Three domains of work

In this podcast, I define three domains of white collar work in the 20th century. In particular, white collar work where one makes $70k a year or more, or white collar work where you work for yourself and develop your own business. This type of work has 3 domains that need to be explored, and how to divide one’s time between these domains is a bit of an optimization problem. The three domains are research, organization, and work itself.

Work itself consists of the things you actually do: the code you write, the processes you engage in, tangible things like that.

Research is the reading you do to gain knowledge to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your work.

Organization is how you arrange you environment, which also makes your work more efficient and/or effective: keeping notes in a journal to track progress, having an organized file system, etc.

Most people lean heavily towards work in a way that is not optimal, and need to allocate more time for reading and organization. Spending too much time in work is a self reinforcing feedback loop because, for example, when you’re sipping your latte and just hammering away at the keyboard, people look up to you as a “hard worker”. They have no idea how efficient you are and how much you are actually accomplishing, which may well be very little. As an example of how rearranging your domain ratio may benefit you, consider this: Warren buffet spends 80% of his time reading (in the domain of research) and he is one of the wealthiest self made men on the planet.

We have this bias towards work because of the way work has been done historically. The way things are now is completely unprecedented, and our brains aren’t wired to work this way. Therefore, shifting away from work and more towards the other 2 domains needs to be done intentionally.

NOTE: This was recorded BEFORE the COVID19 pandemic.