Intentional work.

I have read blog posts and books, listened to podcasts, watched videos, and tried out many different approaches to work. The pomodoro technique is a useful tool in my arsenal, as is time-blocking. Cal Newport champions “Deep work”, AE promotes aiming for “Flow”, and Robert Talbert suggests “Working Mindfully”. More recently, Cal Newport has added nuance to his definition of Deep Work, expanding it to include performing sequential work. Mono-tasking, with deep concentration, on the one task at hand until that task is done.

The central idea to all of these styles of work is, as Cal puts it, the Craftsman mindset.

I am a knowledge worker, I believe, under Cal’s definition. The main career defining output of my work is knowledge communicated through publications, teaching, and presentations. It does not matter how many molecules I synthesise, catalyses I run, or breakthroughs in understanding I make - if I do not communicate the results of my work, then I do not get to keep doing that work. There is no continuing contract awarded for most chromatography columns run in a week. Therefore, the primary output of my work is knowledge. Passed on through communication.

However, I am a knowledge worker that sits on the intersection between knowledge and labour. There is a definitely physical element required. My hypotheses do not sit in a vacuum, there are experiments to perform to give evidence for or against them. Now that I have started working from home, a state that will continue until the current outbreak of the Delta variant is contained, I have found a shift in the needed approach to work.

My day used to be divided into three main types of work:

  1. Deep work - the manuscript writing, literature reading, hypothesis generating, experiment designing work.
  2. Shallow work - the administrative and safety duties, answering queries from fellow researchers, and generally maintaining a working laboratory.
  3. Experimental work - the combination of preparing for and executing an experiment.

Experimental work does not fit under Cal’s definition of Deep Work:
“Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate”

But it cannot. First, laboratories are never distraction-free. A quiet laboratory with no-one else around is a safety hazard and one in which you should not be performing an experiment. Second, the act of experimenting is a demanding task - carefully weighing and combining reagents, monitoring multiple aspects of the reaction, and noting copious amounts of detail - but it is not pushing one’s cognitive capabilities to their limit. There has to be some cognition available to watch for other researcher’s safety and monitor the physical environment. Last, the efforts of a well designed experiment should be easy to replicate. With all of that said, experimenting is not supposed to be covered by the “deep work” definition. It is not, in the performance, knowledge work. It is labour. Labour with skills to be honed like a craftsman.

The key for me is in having a sense of pride in my work. Knowing that as I perform the tasks - some mind-numbingly repetitive, some new and hard - that I am honing my skills and expanding my expertise. There are some tasks that are prerequisites. Not answering email does not make the problem go away. A research group needs the senior members to pass on their craft or it would disappear in a generation or two.

I have had some time to reflect on these approaches to work, particularly with my current inability to do experimental work. I agree with Cal that more deep work and less shallow work provides the best output for knowledge workers (it’s kind of impossible not to as the relative value is built into the definitions). However, as a working physical scientist I want to add my own type of work into the fray: experimental.

The value experimental work generates is tricky to define. Sometimes experiments work perfectly as planned: all the details fit, the data are as expected, and the hypothesis is supported. More often, things are not so clear. Sometimes the circumstances go wrong: the machine malfunctions, the glassware shatters, or the fire alarm goes off just as the catalyst was added. Sometimes the experiment goes awry: the data are strange - was it a calibration issue?; the NMR spectrum does match what was expected - did the reaction give a different product, or was the wrong reagent added? Whilst I’m sure all scientists would like to always have the perfectly planned scenario, the reality is often messier - that is the point of science: a venture into the unknown.

The difference between a good scientist and a bad scientist is not whether they have all of their experiments go as planned or not, but their response to when some inevitably go wrong. A careful and deliberate chemist might make a mistake, but they can trace that mistake and know which experiments were affected. Or they might not get the result they expected, but later connects the dots to realise what happened. A messy and careless chemist just hopes for the best.

Even though I am not currently able to do experimental work, I am reassessing how I place value on the types of work I do. “Shallow work” and “experimental work” can be performed either well or poorly. “Deep work” is, by definition, performed well. My take is this: all of these types of work are important in my job. The value I can add, and the pleasure I can derive from my work, is to perform them well. Intentionally.