Yesterday’s confession had me thinking about the “looking busy” aspects of building or working “in the open”. The thought had crossed my mind that I could just avoid posting anything until I’d built up a ton of writing that I would push all on one day in order to make up for all the days I’d missed, then make it seem as though I had been perfectly productive the whole time. I’m not sure why I thought of that. Maybe the shame of missing days, but then I’d never actually committed to a specific number of words per day, just the overall monthly goal of 50k, which in theory could have been 50k all at once.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m more of a “point me in a direction and then let me work on it independently” so having this daily-posting accountability feels kind of weird, even if I’m the only one holding myself accountable. And this working style is great for some of my work, where it’s almost entirely dependent on just me to get it done, but a bigger proportion of my work is collaborative and can’t be done by myself. For those things, I definitely envy people who are more collaborative and do best with social aspects of working in a group. I just get kind of antsy when I’m in a group project and I’m waiting around for someone else to hand something off to me, because I think about all the other things I could be doing while I’m waiting for other people to get around to my handoff.
There’s probably also a toxic side to “building in the open” or otherwise actively involving people in touch points that they can’t really influence themselves. It strikes me as a sort of “performative productivity” where people make their to-do list into something that needs to be witnessed by others while they’re actively doing it. If there’s more than 2-3 people at the table, but it’s only two people talking to each other the whole time, I feel like it becomes “performative” in the sense that all the other people are really just an audience to the two people having the discussion. Even worse, the meeting is just one person talking at everyone else, with no discussion. There’s some edge cases there, like presentations or lectures that are designed to be seminar-style dissemination of information, rather than discussion, but I think we all know the type of meeting I’m referring to, where you can go the entire meeting without ever saying anything.
There’s some caveats to that too, where even if the meeting is designed to be discussion focused, it turns into just a few people dominating the conversation due to power dynamics or personality traits. Sometimes the meeting is just too many people and there’s no chance for everyone to weigh in on every topic. I think a thoughtful agenda can negate some of that, and I’m a fan of the “Inform, Discuss, Decide” format where everyone gets a set of “pre-read” information to help them prepare for the meeting or orient to the material, then a handful of discussion points with discreet decisions that have to be made.
I have a lot of opinions about meetings because I spend probably the majority of my week in some kind of meeting, whether for my full-time job work or committees that I volunteer to sit on or for my professional society involvements or for my own career development mentorship. There’s some I look forward to and some I dread.
I will say – and this probably marks me as a “manager” – that there’s some interesting tradeoffs with in-person meetings versus virtual meetings. I think virtual meetings, overall, tend to be more productive because there’s a layer of impersonal-ness to them, being through a screen or a phone. In-person meetings, while less productive, are more emotional (for better or worse) due to the interpersonal-ness of seeing or sensing people’s body language. Both are good, but for different reasons. I actually prefer 1-1 meetings to be in-person, but meetings with more than 3-4 people to be virtual – a 1-1 is more about the interpersonal relationship while the larger meetings are more about getting something decided. Well, usually the big meetings are about getting something done, but not always, there’s certainly some larger meetings that are also about interpersonal relationships or general vibe checking that is best done in-person versus remote.
On one hand, then, I understand the “return to office” argument of morale and culture building. I do think hybrid teams end up being more productive overall, having a mix of both, although I’m not using any statistical data to back that up, just my own vibes and my own bias having a scientific background where at least some work must be in-person at the bench and some work can be done remotely like computational analyses.
Getting some space to work remotely gives me space and time to think a little deeper. I also prefer the “give me a direction and then let me work” management style, so that makes sense that I wouldn’t want to be constantly “building in the open” with collaborative group-project style work, Id rather get to some meaningful milestone before I share what I’ve been working on.
While that’s what fits my work style best, I also completely understand it’s not always practical or responsible to go near radio silence for stretches of time while I’m working things out (or, as yesterday proves, not doing anything…); there needs to be some way to measure my progress, my productivity, and ensure I’m meeting expectations and not stuck or blocked and not asking for help. Sometimes that can be as simple as keeping a running document with analyses or outcomes that can be accessed by all the stakeholders, for example like when I’m writing a paper with multiple coauthors, using a shared document where they can see my progress (or lack thereof) and adjust their expectations or reach out with questions and comments accordingly. Sometimes, it’s just shooting a quick email saying “hey, this and that to-do item is on my list, I haven’t forgotten, I just got stuck in step X”, like when someone is waiting on a figure or a dataset. Having some way for my managers or my mentors to get visibility in what I’m doing (while giving me the space to do it) requires that I understand whether my manager or mentor is okay with that approach.
Maybe that’s why the CONFESSION of not having made progress was hard for me to own up to. There’s no mentor or manager here, just me holding myself accountable, and that was tough.
Lindsay K. Pino 