2 kinds of work—thinking & execution

In my world there are 2 kinds of work: thinking and execution, and they are very different.

Execution work is what most people call "work" it's the day-to-day chop-wood-carry-water. The meetings, the video making, the writing, the public speaking, the event planning, the inviting people to attend things, the doing.

Execution work is frenetic. It's constant motion. It's best in a big room with a lot of people, or on the phone, or on twitter. It usually has some background music.

Thinking work, however, is very different. It doesn't look or feel much like work. It's a lot of pacing and scratching my head. It's done out in bars and coffee shops as often as it's done in the office. It's slow, painfully, arduously slow.

For me, thinking work is alternating periods of isolation in which I consider a subject as deeply as I can, scribble my thinking into a proposal, and then pitch it to someone and they tell me what I've missed or where my thinking is flawed. So it's back-and-forth, consider/pitch , consider/pitch, and my thinking gets better, iteratively, as I go.

These two kinds of work: thinking & execution, don't coexist well. It's very hard to do thinking work is very sensitive to interruption. And execution work is like . . . constant interruption. So without some disciplined time management, everything becomes execution work. It becomes all chop-wood-carry-water without ever stopping to consider whether more wood & water would be helpful.

I read a piece recently about this phenomenon. And a psychologist quoted in the article called that "tunneling." It can be really helpful, ya know, to block out all the outside noise and just work, just get stuff done.

But if I spend too much time in the tunnel, I wind up doing all urgent work. No big important, improbable projects. I don't ever get around to the kinds of things that really create profound change.

Which is, ya know, what I'm hear for.

So, I need both. I have to figure out how to organize my life so that I have time and space well suited to both kinds of work. And I suspect that you do too.