Reframing inbound email as Hamming's Open Door
My longstanding antagonism with email has recently improved by reframing my inbox along the lines of Hamming’s “open door” from his oft-referenced advice to scientists:
I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But ten years later, somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.
He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. […] There is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things.
Although people who work with doors closed often work harder, somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing. Not much, but enough that they miss fame.
This is a just one of those small mindset things, of course; maybe it’s temporary and maybe it’s non-transferrable. But for me, at least, it has been quite helpful to start perceiving my day’s inbound, reactive tasks as less of an oppositional force to my core focused work, and more of an enabler of its long-term relevance. (Plus, it has actually been kind of fun to go a bit deeper into various unexpected conversations.)
Comments (3)
But not "missing fame" does not enable long-term relevance.
It's disappointing that Hamming would equate fame with "what might be important."
In this case, I'd tend to read "fame" a bit more innocently/optimistically. Imagine being in a context where one wasn't primarily thinking about the bad actors who want to game the system, and one was able to believe that good scientific work would tend to be more frequently read, referenced, and built upon. In that situation, the "famous" work (i.e., the work that other scientists know about, use, and value) would, by definition, also be the work that was impactful, valuable, and meaningful. (Plus or minus a couple decades to catch the wind, of course.) If you happened to hold that sort of worldview, and if you believed that your listeners happened to be equally non-cynical and authentic, then you could fairly reasonably use the "fame" of one's work (and thus, presumably oneself) as a proxy for the "impact" of the work.
Of course, as the prize becomes higher profile and more valuable, an ever-increasing number of clowns will invariably show up to game it. But if you're able to consider them a rounding error, or if you believe that they're ultimately identifiable as clowns, and that the people you are speaking to AREN'T clowns, then I could understand not wanting to bother with the verbal gymnastics requires to caveat and bracket their various misbehaviors, and simply say that fame proxies impact.
Same deal w/ nonfiction. Any impactful book is always also a profitable book, to at least some degree (zero profits means zero impact, because nobody has read it). But NOT every profitable book is an impactful book, because it's possible to game the system. But if I spent all of my time worrying about the folks who are behaving cynically and gaming the games to pad their wallets, then I'd never get any work done. Maybe Hamming felt similarly. Or maybe he operated in such a golden age of science that he never even had to worry about it ;)
I am always mindful when sending you a note that it may be awhile before you can reply. It also gratifies me to see you delegating a problem/concern to those who can take care of it withour you feeling you have to tend to everything.