Thinking critically about your work

I often think about "thinking about work". Meta working, or the work within the work. Doing it all day is counter-productive - none of your actual work will get done. But I think it's crucial to take a step back and think through the reasons you're doing the things you do all day, look for better ways, and not be just a participant in your job but a planner. Don't just be the construction crew, be the architect. Don't just execute, design.

If you never take a step back and think critically about what you're doing with your time, you might find out that you were on a hamster wheel and just wasted 6 months or a year of your life. Here's an extreme example of what it looks like to never question your work.

The scanners

I was working at a previous job in another role, and sitting across from me I watched some interns scanning medical records day in and day out. The company had purchased a clinical trial and along with it came 1 million pages of paper in 450 boxes. The job was to scan the whole thing. So the company hired some highschoolers, hooked up some consumer grade scanners, plugged a hard drive into the back of each one, and the kids turned on Netflix while they sat and scanned boxes all day. And they kept at it for like 6 months. They seemed busy, but what concerned me was that they didn't seem to be moving very quickly.

One day I walked up and asked them how things were going. How many boxes do you have left? How long does a box take? How many have you done so far? I did a quick spreadsheet calculation and found that at their current pace and speed, it would take 20 months to finish the project. I dug in a little deeper - they were skipping crucial data, and 5% of the PDFs that had been scanned were corrupted! They had to completely start over.

Without stopping to question the how or the why of the job, these kids had inadvertently wasted 6 months of their lives (and company time and money) doing a super mundane job for no purpose.

I took 3 hours to think through the problems I had learned about the project, wrote up a Google doc with all the issues, and did some quick math for what it would take to finish quickly. How many pages per hour did they need to scan to make it happen in 3 months? The consumer grade scanners could only do 1,000 pages a day poorly, we needed one that could do 10,000 reliably. I found a production scanner on eBay, calculated some quick cost savings, made a work schedule, a simple process to make sure each box was scanned properly, and a robust method for scanning and storing the PDFs in a safe location. I showed the proposal to the company President and discussed what was needed, and got approval to buy the scanner and oversee the team. I made a simple spreadsheet dashboard to monitor project progress, got the scanner and a laptop set up, helped scan a few boxes to figure out all the details that needed to work to make it happen consistently, and then once the process was all figured out, let them keep going with minimal oversight from me.

The results were that the team started over, and completed the project in 4 months. When 1 box used to take 4 hours, they were able at times to finish as many as 20 boxes in a single day. The data was accurate, stored safely, every box was accounted for, and the kids were able to get the job done in a timely manner.

The google sheet dashboard I made. The kids went from 1-2 boxes per day to an average of 7 (up to 20!).

Learnings

The fastest hamster. One of the kids was actually very efficient at his job! He was the top scanner on the team. He was reliable and consistent. When the feeble consumer grade scanners would reject a document, he knew which buttons to push to get it working again. When it jammed 5 times an hour, he could efficiently clear the feeder and keep it going. When he had to wait 20 minutes for a batch to finish processing, he used that time to prepare the next batch. If you were to look at him you might say he is a high performer and give him a raise. But in effect, he was just as useless at his job as all the other people because he had failed to consider his work critically. When the entire project was a failure because they were skipping and corrupting data, and they were slowed by using the wrong tools for the job, his efficiency and diligence only had a marginal impact. He was just the fastest hamster on the wheel to nowhere. He was a great employee in a bad system, and all it took was a little intentional thought to get things on the right track so these positive attributes could really shine.

Think critically. Had nobody stopped for a few hours and thought critically about the work this team was doing, why they were doing it, and how they were doing it, then the project might have continued for another two years without success, with unknown amounts of missing data. Don't make the assumption that anyone knows better than you how to do the work you do. If you have a gut feeling that something isn't right, pursue that idea to its logical conclusion. You might just save yourself a year of pain and suffering.

Failure obsession. People in the startup space and tech sector are obsessed with moving fast and failing. But how many companies and projects could have avoided failures, measured in months and millions of dollars, by just sitting down for an hour or three of critical thinking? How much faster and more agile could you be if you just planned your work properly? I am reminded of the Jurassic Park movie quote, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." You should still move fast and break things - but only once you're heading in the right direction.

Encourage a culture of truth seeking. Often we pursue the wrong things for too long because we trust, like and respect the people we work with, and don't make a fuss when we see things are going wrong. But how much kinder would it be if we were more thoughtful and honest, and prioritized truth over short term feelings? The kind thing was to tell these interns was that their project was a failure for now, but that if some changes are made it could succeed. And it did. Because the company valued truth. If my input on the project had been interpreted as being nosy, interfering or critical of someone just doing their job, then I wouldn't have risked offending the scanners or creating and presenting a plan to go forward. But because I felt comfortable that 1. this needed to be addressed 2. I was able to question and have ideas and 3. present those ideas and 4. make those ideas a reality, the company was better off for it.

Agency. Part of this is the principle of agency. Who decides what you do, how you do it, and why you do it? Do you work all day assuming that you only have 10% control over your life instead of 100% control? Without taking your own work into your hands, you give that up to others or the status quo, for better or worse. You are a free agent, and you exist to do what you think is right and meaningful.

Anyway those are my thoughts, let me know what strikes a chord.