Hello there, friend!

First, a short editor’s note: after failing to write anything last week, I’m finally back with a proper essay. It took quite long to write (partly the reason for the 2-day delay, though this is also because I’m still not quite back in my working rhythm), and I’m still not too happy about it – I know it’s quite abstract and dense, clearly demonstrating my still-too-shallow grasp of the topics. On the other hand, these explorations at the edge of my conceptual ability are really rewarding, and they are precisely what helps me with deepening my understanding. I really hope you’ll still get something out of reading it, and I would love any feedback. Let’s get started!

When thinking about work, I find it useful to divide it into three different layers. I initially called the layers strategic, tactical, and operational, but recently I've taken to calling them simply the Why?, How?, and What? layers. As the original names suggest, the deeper the layer, the more influence it has over your activity.

The Why? layer is the foundation – it revolves around your values, mindsets, beliefs, and opinions, but also around the culture and communities you are embedded in¹. It provides the meaning and stakes for what you do, as well shaping your perception of the options available to you in the other two layers. In other words, the Why? layer determines our orientation and motivation. The How? layer is about your skills in the narrow sense and more broadly about the options available to you. Its interaction with the Why? layer is what both affords and constrains the What? level – your options and their total requirements (the difficulty of their implementation + the opportunity cost of not pursuing other options) set the required level for motivation. If your motivation exceeds that level, you will pursue that option, if not, you will pursue something else. This means that if you're really motivated but something is very difficult for you, you're still not too likely to do it, and on the other hand, if your motivation is lacking but something is easy enough, you might still follow through with it (this equation is best visible with habits, which is why it's recommended to make every new habit as easy as possible at first, and only gradually increase the difficulty). Finally, the What? layer revolves around the goals and standards that you pursue – the projects and practices that you're working on. This is where your Why finally turns into action, this is where the rubber meets the road.

Thus, the What? layer is the point of contact with reality and therefore it is where you receive direct feedback – did your actions produce the desired results or not? As such, this is also the layer most readily available for reflection and adjustment. However, the adjustments that occur on this level are the least consequential, ultimately amounting to simple conditioning. These adjustments don't really generalize – they remain localized to the specific action being adjusted – unless they are caused by a deeper disturbance or unless enough of them accumulate for you to notice a pattern. Only then might the adjustments spread beneath the tip-of-the-iceberg What? layer to the How? or even the Why? layer. Therefore, reflection and adjustments on the deeper layers rarely happen spontaneously, without any intentional effort – you're not really getting direct feedback here, and if you do, then only with a significant delay which makes the feedback difficult to interpret. This is the crux of the problem – while the influence over our behavior "starts with Why", the feedback that prompts adjustments starts with What.

On the one hand, this is desirable, as too frequent changes on these layers could cause you to be very unstable and unpredictable both to others and to yourself – if your actions fail, you don't usually need to take an entirely different approach, much less transform your core values². On the other hand, this means that the deeper the layer, the more intentionality you need to fix any problems in it. Without that, the problems will keep propagating into the upper layers, forming a sort of attractor around which your errors will concentrate. This kind of reflection and improvement is precisely the domain of metawork, and now that I've fleshed out the three layers of work, let's have a look at the corresponding elements of metawork.

Starting from the opposite direction, consider first the poster child of personal metawork – productivity (i.e. its various methods and tools) and its collective metawork cousin, project management. Both can be generally summarized as organization and optimization of the What? layer, keeping track of tasks and your and your collaborators' schedules so that nothing falls through the cracks and you use your TEA (time, energy, and attention, credits to Ondra) efficiently and effectively. Even though some more reflexive elements of productivity and project management frameworks (e.g. weekly reviews and similar) attempt to work with the How? and Why? layers, it's quite clear that their primary focus is the What. Furthermore, since productivity and PM have as their object the least consequential layer, they can feel like pointless overhead, especially when they become an end in themselves. And while I still maintain that done right, productivity and PM methods enhance focus which can lead to deeper engagement and clearer feedback, these outcomes are ultimately still dependent on your taking proper care of the deeper layers.

Next, since the How? layer is about your skills and options constraining the What, the associated elements of metawork here should be centered around learning and designing the systems that shape behavior. From this point of view, the related elements of personal metawork include personal knowledge management frameworks and tools, as well as habit design. In terms of collective metawork, organization design, organizational learning, and process management seem to be the best fit. Naturally, since many of these disciplines are more or less directly about learning, they might also prompt adjustments on the other two layers. However, the more they rely on propositional and procedural learning (i.e. learning of abstract facts and frameworks, and training skills), the less they will be able to address the deepest Why? layer.

This is because the propositional and procedural knowing depend on the perspectival (i.e. the kind of knowing that helps us see which facts and skills are relevant from a given perspective) and participatory (i.e. "knowing by being", rooted in your weddedness to your environment your understanding of your role in co-creating the environment, and its role in co-creating you) knowing. These are the foundational levels types of knowing and as such, they form the basis for the values, mindsets, and beliefs in which the Why? layer is grounded. Thus, the elements of metawork that address this layer have to be able to address these types of knowing. According to John Vervaeke, this requires an ecology of wisdom-cultivating practices, including practices for mindfulness, contemplation, and embodiment. Moreover, there need to be practices for entering a collective zone of proximal development that simultaneously facilitate the feeling of community and belonging with others through continuous exploration and internalization of the perspectives of one another, while also entering into a relationship with the desired aim with which you're trying to align the Why? layer. This aim is typically some kind of virtue to which members of the groups aspire, but it can theoretically also be some future state of a system you're trying to create. What matters is that the object of the collective practice is open-ended and aspirational.

The distributed cognition unlocked by such a practice allows everyone to understand and internalize this aspiration incomparable more powerfully than would be possible for individuals and thus helps everyone properly cultivate their Why? and align it with the upper layers. Thus, (especially collective) wisdom-cultivating practices are at the heart of metawork.

Footnotes

1. These two groups, the personal and the collective, are mutually interdependent, shaping and co-creating one another, and because of this, it doesn't make sense to try and say which comes first or which one is more important. Individuals shape culture, and culture shapes individuals. Though culture arguably has a larger influence over most individuals than the other way around, everyone can to a large degree influence which aspects of the culture we engage with, and we can help them spread.

2. In fact, many actions have almost a 100% base failure rate – think cold-messaging potential clients/employers – so failure here doesn't necessarily require adjustments even on the What? layer itself.

Last week’s dig-ups

The podcast excerpt curation became quite a drag, so I’m scaling it way down. On the flip side, I now expect to engage more in learning stuff about which it will be easier to share notes in the future.

Personal metawork

• Open AI recently shared a great guide of GPT best practices.

Entrepreneurship

• Great tips about prospecting (primarily on Linked In, but a lot of it is usable anywhere). Highlight: create a list of prospects, then send a message saying something like "Hey [name], are you interested in [category of your product/service]? I’m asking because I created a [your lead magnet, e.g. some educational material you created]. Let me know if you want it and I’ll send it to you.” Then, move those who replied further down your funnel, and don’t be afraid to remind those who didn’t until you get a hard no.

Philosophy & Sense-making

• The last 2 episodes of John Vervaeke’s After Socrates were really powerful, exploring the magic that happens in dialectical practices and why it’s so needed right now. If you do watch them, the last third of this week’s essay will probably be more understandable :)

Reflection

As mentioned in the beginning, I’m still getting back to my previous work rhythm. That said, it’s already much better, and one thing that helped was reflecting on the causes:

• Basically, I entered the perfect storm – after submitting the 560 hours of work that was my thesis, I decided to take a big break from trying to be productive, regressing for a while to many relaxing methods of my approximately 10-years-younger self (like computer games). While fully deserved, this meant that I would be tempted by these distractions even when I didn’t want to be (which is the main reason why I don’t really play multiplayer games).

• Also, because of several social events, my sleep schedule took a big hit (meaning I was often quite tired during the day), which was then also compounded by the disruption of my morning routines (because I often slept at my I-think-girlfriend’s place and got home only quite late in the morning).

• In addition, though I’m really looking forward to taking on the challenge of entrepreneurship, it’s still a bit overwhelming new direction where there are so many things to do that it took me some time to clearly articulate the priorities. And unfortunately, the biggest priority was a boring administrative task.

• Finally, the thesis writing sprint led me to drop most of my productivity habits like weekly reviews and daily planning, because they’re not really helpful for huge monolithic projects.

But I’m almost back on track, and having this experience with rebooting my momentum was a great learning and reflection opportunity, so it’s all good.

And that’s it! Let me know what resonated or what I should improve, and I’ll see you here next week.

Have a great start of summer

Chris