Daily Productive Sharing 1229 - Impact, Agency, and Taste

One helpful tip per day:)

Ben Kuhn argues that the biggest bottleneck at work is the ability to find and execute high-leverage activities—the kind of work that multiplies your output per hour:

1. Agency: A combination of proactive initiative, persistence, and resourcefulness to make things happen.
2. Taste: An intuitive judgment about what is likely to work and what is not.
3. Without good taste, you might work hard in the wrong direction; without agency, even if you have the right direction, you might accomplish nothing.
4. A simple way to gain more leverage is to take a goal you’re already pursuing and find a better way to achieve it.
5. A counterintuitive fact about high-leverage projects: they’re often not obvious beforehand—if they were, someone would have done them already.
6. Don’t wait for someone to approve your actions; instead, tell them what you’re planning to do.
7. Because high-leverage work is hard to identify, self-initiated projects will sometimes fail—you might misjudge their true impact or difficulty.
8. Highly proactive people have a key trait: they take responsibility for achieving outcomes, not just for completing tasks.
9. If your project needs others to push it forward, you’re draining a scarce team resource. If you make progress inevitable by yourself, you produce resources for the team and help break bottlenecks.
10. People's taste quality is often highly personalized and specific to their domain.
11. Many people underestimate their own taste because they assume that having good taste would make them _feel_especially smart or capable.
12. But in reality, as Ben notes, you might never feel particularly brilliant—you just start noticing how many things around you are surprisingly broken or inefficient.
13. Whenever you’re unsure what to do, ask yourself: “If I choose option A, what do I predict will happen?” Then walk through possible scenarios.
14. The most effective people are usually the most skilled at metacognition—they frequently reflect on how they think and work, and keep improving their processes.
15. Ben's favorite habit for building metacognitive skills is doing a weekly review.

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Ben Kuhn 认为工作中最大的瓶颈，是获得杠杆的能力——也就是找到并执行那些每小时产出倍增的高影响力工作：

1. 主动性（agency）：即结合了主动推动事情发生的意识，以及坚持不懈与足智多谋的能力。
2. 品味（taste）：即对什么事情可行、什么事情不可行的直觉判断力。
3. 如果缺乏品味，很可能努力的方向就是错误的；如果缺乏主动性，即使方向对了，也可能一事无成。
4. 获得更高杠杆的一个简单方法是：拿你已经在努力的目标，去寻找一种更好的完成方式。
5. 关于高杠杆项目，有一个反直觉的事实是：这些项目通常在事前对大多数人来说并不明显（因为如果一开始就显而易见，早就有人做了）。
6. 不要等别人批准你去做什么，而是直接告诉他们你打算去做什么。
7. 当然，由于高杠杆项目本身不明显，这也意味着：你自发尝试的高影响力项目，有时也会失败，因为你可能误判了它们的影响力或难度。
8. 主动性高的人有一个共同特征：他们对实现目标负责，而不仅仅是做了某些工作。
9. 如果你的项目必须依靠别人来推动才能成功，那么你就是在消耗团队中稀缺的资源；如果你能自己让项目变得不可避免地推进，那么你就是资源的生产者，能够帮助团队打破关键瓶颈。
10. 大多数人的品味质量，其实是高度个性化和领域相关的。
11. 很多人低估了自己的品味，因为他们以为拥有好品味会让自己感到非常聪明、能干、擅长一切。
12. 但我要告诉你，至少如果你跟我一样，你永远不会觉得自己聪明或能干；相反，你只是越来越觉得，周围的人似乎在很多事情上莫名其妙地表现很差。
13. 每当你犹豫该做什么时，明确问自己：“如果我选择了方案 A，我预测会发生什么？”并试着展开后续情景推演。
14. 正因如此，我发现那些最有效率的人，通常也是最善于元认知（metacognition）的人——他们经常反思自己的工作和思考流程，并不断改进。
15. 我自己养成元认知习惯的最好方式，就是每周复盘（weekly review）。

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