I am amused (but not surprised) by the “BUT WHERE ARE THE DETAILS?!” responses. If you wait to announce your goals until you’ve got all the details figured out, everyone will shout about how you’re not doing anything. But if you announce your goals first, everyone will shout about how you have no plan.

And really, the Biden administration can put out all the details they want, but that doesn’t solve the problem of obstructionist Republicans in Congress.

I’m a big fan of the Pareto principle. I’m also a big fan of Sturgeon’s law. Both of them boil down to the same idea: most of the value of a set of things comes from a small portion of that set.

Take meetings, for example. There are two ways you could take this:

• A few of your meetings are much more valuable than all the rest, or:
• You could make each meeting much shorter without losing much value

Both of those are debatable in practice, but it’s a fun exercise in intense intervention.

While I agree in theory, I think the problem with this sort of approach is that, while—per Sturgeon—90% of everything may be crap, you don’t know which 10% is the good stuff until you’ve gone through it all.

Productivity maintenance becomes a means to prove your fitness for the future, and, as such, your value as an employee: you have the skills, the fortitude, and the control over your immediate environment to work through the inevitable catastrophes and demands of the market. Whatever shit the world throws at you, the work endures. It’s not that you want to be a heartless robot; it’s that the market is hostile to those who aren’t, no matter what your manager assures you. The manager’s crisis refrain of “feel free to take some time, if you need it” is fundamentally a sorting question: are you someone who needs it or are you someone who can ignore that you do?