Why are white-collar workers hardworking and not rich?

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Text | Popov


Text | Popov

The snorkeling mode of work dominates the current office.

Every day in the cubicle is always busy. There are always a few meetings in a day, dozens of emails, dozens of WeChat groups, you have no idle time, but when you get off work, you still find that there are still many important jobs. To be done, to be exact, during the eight hours of work, almost all of them are occupied by transactional work. These jobs are not very demanding on cognitive ability, and they do not create new values ​​and are easily copied.

But busyness does not mean productivity. In modern enterprises, the work of knowledge workers is more complicated than that of manual workers. It is also very difficult to measure the specific value of individual creation of company output, which leads to the fact that the workers may not have more talents. It is not necessarily a high salary. The fatigue, frustration and hopelessness that prevail in the workplace. A large number of white-collar workers struggled on the subsistence line, "hardworking" and not rich.

This may be a trap that many office people are experiencing, but they cannot reverse the situation and get rid of this frustrating snorkeling work.

In the ten years after graduating from college, Carl Newport completed a series of things that seemed almost impossible: he received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published four best-selling books, and published dozens of academics. Thesis, and a tenured faculty at Georgetown University.

Newport owes all of this to the "deep work method" that doesn't follow the crowd: he doesn't go to Twitter, doesn't go to Facebook, and even seldom responds to emails. His official website doesn't have a personal email address. What is even more surprising is that he rarely works until 6 pm on weekdays, and rarely works overtime or recharges on weekends. He summarizes his deep learning experience in the book Deep Work:

"My daily work is centered around carefully selected in-depth work. The sloated activities that are really unavoidable are split into small pieces and completed in the gap between the schedules. Three or four hours a day, there is no disturbing, carefully arranged focus every Friday and every day. Work brings a lot of very valuable output."

In addition, "From the time I got home from work to the next morning workday, I barely touched the computer (only write the exception).....away from the interference in life, alleviating the tension that seems to be increasingly eroding people's daily lives. The amount of mental intelligence." Because of the high degree of attention, it is easy to help people enter the state of flow, resulting in high efficiency and pleasure.

It's also easy to explain the behavioral pattern of workaholics. The psychologist Harry Cheekson Mihalai's research shows that for workaholics, work has its own internal goals, feedback rules and challenges, all of which encourage individuals to be active. Participate in the work and concentrate on it. On the contrary, leisure time is loosely organized and requires a lot of effort to create something that is worth enjoying.

The core of the deep work method that Newport praises is actually to concentrate on a specific job in a certain period of time, instead of chatting with each other in a five-minute WeChat group, brushing a circle of friends, and clicking on the new mail. When he was a graduate student at the Ivy League School in the United States, he found that the best students were usually spending less time studying than GPA.

Newport thus proposed a value creation formula: "high value output = highly focused x time."

When most people are busy with ambiguous goals, those who have the ability to work in depth will have a huge advantage, but how to shape the depth of work in a cell phone, notebook, WeChat, qq, email-enclosed grid The atmosphere and ability, Newport recommended the "in-depth work schedule of the Twin Peaks philosophy":

Divide your personal time into two pieces, use a certain period of time for deep pursuit, and do all the other things for the rest of the time. In deep time, the bimodal workers must work like an ascetic – pursuing high-intensity, undisturbed concentration.

Wharton professor Adam Grant, who concentrates all courses on one semester each year, focuses on research the rest of the year. In the semester of the course, he will pick up three or four days a month and keep himself in the study.

But there are so few people who can freely allocate time. Therefore, Newport also offers some advice for white-collar workers who work in the company:

1. Cultivate fixed habits

The New York Times columnist David Brooks once said, "The great creative mind is thinking like an artist, working like an accountant." Darwin almost keeps the same rhythm every day when writing "The Origin of Species": Get up at 7 in the morning. Then, take a walk, have breakfast, work in the study from 8:00 to 9:30, then use one hour to read the letter of the previous day, and then return to the study from 10:30 to noon. In the afternoon he will continue to walk and think deeply about some challenging ideas, until he comes up with a satisfactory answer, his food will stop and declare the end of the day's work.

For ordinary people, when entering deep work, it should be clear where to work and how long to work. The principle of clear work after the start of work, such as not using any network, or setting the goal that must be completed every 30 minutes. You also have to think about how to support your work, such as starting with a cup of coffee.

2, there must be a big hand

In the winter of 2007, JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series, the last "Death of the Death", when the pressure was oversized. What was worse was that she found it more and more difficult to concentrate on her own study, and it was the time to wipe the glass. After a while, the child was crying. Finally, she decided to stay in the expensive Balmeral hotel in the heart of Edinburgh. From the window of this Victorian building, I can see Edinburgh Castle, and that is Rowling’s Hogwarts The source of inspiration for the Magic School.

But the use of these big changes to change the environment is mostly big coffee, not everyone can afford luxury hotels, but the key to doing so is to create a serious atmosphere of attention by changing the environment. For example, you can unplug your home network cable, pull up the curtains, and stop accepting the courier.

3, making a comfortable time

Anders Eriksson, the advocate of "Deliberate Practice Theory", found that for beginners, an hour of high concentration is already the limit. For experts, this limit is only four hours. Because people's attention resources are scarce and easy to get tired. A study by Dutch psychologist Epp Dixterius found that giving a conscious mind a break can activate an unconscious mind, potentially cleaning up the most complex career challenges.

For white-collar workers, if there is a shortcut to get rid of the "hard work and not rich" trap, it is to switch from the shallow work mode to the deep work mode as soon as possible, significantly increasing the value of labor. Finish

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