On Bullshit Work

CLIII

[An Allergy to Bullshit Work; Petition to Move an Exam; Skin in the Game; Identifying Real Work; You'll be Wrong; Don’t Create More Work; AI Slop Bombs; Do the Hard Thing]

Thesis: Avoid bullshit work like the plague and do the few things that will actually move the needle.

[An Allergy to Bullshit Work]

It is way easier to do bullshit work than real work.

But, if you are able to avoid bullshit work and just do real work, you will achieve more and be more fulfilled, too.

I'm writing this post this week because I recently got a few messages that on the surface 'seemed' productive to the sender but really just magically generated more bullshit work than was needed to achieve the desired outcome.

I'm taking the time to write about this because while creating bullshit work for other people is no way to live, sometimes the differences between actions that create this fake work and ones that don't can be subtle. You might genuinely not realize it, especially if you operate in an environment where other people do this all the time.

It might seem harsh, but I would argue that if you’re aware of what you’re doing, creating bullshit work is a selfish and antisocial act: you're wasting someone's time that could be spent on something meaningful.

This is particularly impactful in environments with very aggressive & honest feedback loops, like startups, where avoiding bullshit work and doing the high leverage items can be the difference between succeeding and failing.

So, coming up in this blog post:

• We revisit my college experience in a den of business LARPers

• We talk about what actually constitutes real & fake work and how to identify the difference

• I complain about some specific examples of people creating more work for me in ways that should be criminal

[Petition to Move an Exam]

Man, I loved the University of Michigan as a place with people at it.

But Ross, the business school, was such an attractor of people who love bullshit.

Ross, at the time, was the 3rd best undergraduate business school in the country, second only to Wharton and either Haas or Stern (can't recall). Yet it was FULL of people who thrived doing bullshit work. They spent far more time signaling that they were doing work and talking about how hard class was than they spent studying or actually doing anything.

We'll call this type of person Ross Natives, although there was another, more vulgar term on campus we could perhaps apply to them...

They got so invested in and caught up in the narrative that they were God's chosen few who would walk out of school with a job paying between $80K-$120K and storm America's C Suite over the next 15 years. To them, this narrative was gospel, they lived in it.

Some tell tale signs of Ross Natives:

• They'd complain about how hard classes were all the time

• They'd always 'study' in groups in public places (the beloved Winter Garden) so you knew they had friends or were part of the 'in group', but obviously no studying was done

• A large part of their identity was the clubs they were in and then the internship and then the job they got

• They 'studied' by memorizing practice exams rather than by internalizing any of the materials or lessons

The important pieces of this are that they tended to avoid the real work of learning and replace it with time signalling and making the universe think they were working.

To paint the picture with the best example I have: In one particular instance, our entire class of ~550 had an accounting exam coming up. For whatever reason, some of the students, certainly all Natives, decided that the academic calender the accounting department had planned out wasn't actually fair or equitable or some other such nonsense. (the real 'reason' they gave is escaping me)

Regardless, this group wrote a petition to move the exam back one week and got it signed by enough students that the accounting department listened! And they did so in what I remembering being a weirdly apologetic way, saying, "You're right, we're sorry, we didn't think about that."

Writing, signing, and presenting this petition falls squarely into the category of bullshit work. If whoever contrived this scheme or was party to it would have spent the same amount of time they spent on the endeavor actually studying, they would've been fine for the exam.

Instead, they created more work for everybody: - themselves for writing it, admin who had to respond to their emails, the accounting department for having to shift the schedule, the students who actually studied and would now have to stay fresh on the material a week later.

This is why I posit bullshit work is selfish: it self propagates like a swarm of rabbits in spring. These students couldn't be bothered to study for whatever reason, so they did some bullshit work that created more bullshit work and wasted everyone’s time.

The most mind numbing part of the whole thing is that Ross is graded on a quite odd curve: while it stopped more than 40% of students from getting A's in a given class, to get lower than a B, you basically had to have beef with the professor.

At best, the people who wrote and executed the petition shifted some As to Bs and some Bs to As.

[Skin in the Game]

In a troubling turn, reality will not disprove the narrative these Ross Natives have in their heads. Many of them genuinely will end up as partners at consulting shops, GP’s for VC and PE funds, MD's at Investment banks, and VP’s and likely even a few C Level execs at major American corporations.

For starters, the students who wrote that petition could probably put it on their resume & talk about it in an interview.

More importantly, since less than 40% of the people at a place like Ross actually bothered to learn the content, due to that strange curve that basically guaranteed the ‘top 40%’ would get A’s, you could potentially get an A by memorizing rather than learning! (not more than 10% of the questions on a given exam were designed to trip up the memorizers, and these would always be the ones the memorizers all got wrong and complained about later)

In other words, the reward system was broken--at a place like that, you didn't NEED to learn to get a strong outcome! But sigh, isn't learning the point of school?

Based on conversations with compatriots at other universities and now in corporate America, I have no reason to expect this is different elsewhere and believe it carries forward quite cleaning into many (but not all) corporate roles. These same people will send a lot of emails and be vaguely involved in many projects without actually contributing tangibly to their outcomes. Books like Deep Work and Bullshit Jobs reinforce this conclusion.

This is without mentioning the latest color of corporate delusions, like the phenomena at Zillow in which executives are confusing tokens consumed with a real measure of productivity, to the dismay of many engineers who feel that if they don't play along with the ensloppification, they'll be fired.

I really do believe that the people who create real outcomes are power law distributed and roughly follow the Pareto Principle--20% of people produce 80% of the outcome in many fields.

This is why I'm so enthralled by being close to the P&L, and learning about real tangible things.

Not everyone at Ross thrived in nonsense work. Some people saw through the bullshit. They were often:

• Studying CS or Math in conjunction with business (mote honesy feedback loop, math and code works or it doesn’t)

• Traders who were actually close to the P&L, meaning they had a brutally honest reward system

• Business owners, which I've always thought involved one of the most honest feedback loops

The commonalities between all of these people is they actually were closer to reality and the consequences of their actions.

I think that matters a lot.

[Identifying Real Work]

In most situations, there are a handful of actions you can take that will move you forward more than anything else.

For my startup, BirdDog, these actions are often related to improving the product or our 'growth engine', which includes how we market and sell the product.

There are other important things, like our finances, but these are often times a lot more bounded. I go over our books once a month for 2 hours and incidentally whenever we need to make a non trivial monetary decision.

Our bookkeeping system, though, is very emergent. Meaning I am doing the bare minimum needed to manage the finances at any given time. As an example, we did not bother tracking the states of each of our customers until the end of last year when we were making sure we didn't cross a transaction threshold for any given state.

This month, I'll be adding in another sheet to track money due to referral partners, because it's reached the point where I don't feel confident I can keep track of it in my head.

But, if I wanted to, I could have spent 10s of hours one year ago preliminarily adding these things into the finance system, along with others, like bad account provisions and AR and so many other things. It might’ve feel productive, but it would’ve been bullshit. I would’ve been solving for problems that, at the time, weren’t real. Instead, we have an ad hoc, iterative approach to building system like this, and it helps us avoid bullshit a lot.

Those same 10 hours I could’ve spent optimizing a spreadsheet were better spent getting customers or making the product better.

And even with something like product work as a category, there are things that are different levels of ROI. This weekend, I spent an hour 1.5x'ing the size of our company database. That's a way higher leverage hour than it would've been if I spent that same time debating the ideal shade of a fucking button.

You have constrained resources and you can only do so many things at once, so you really should be making sure they are the highest leverage things. Don't solve problems that don't exist.

[You'll be Wrong]

Also to be clear, you don't have to be right about what the highest leverage thing is - you'll probably be wrong until you do it and test it and find it out.

That goes back to my post on Retardmaxxing - in more situations than we think, the cost of being wrong is lower than the cost of doing nothing. (if it’s not, it’s worth asking if there’s a way you can lower the cost of being wrong)

To be clear, though, aggressively taking action is completely congruent with not doing bullshit work; a lot of bullshit work can be identified by prioritizing talk and analysis about an important thing over doing the important thing.

When you Retardmax, you make sure the downside is actually not that deep and proceed with the action.

[Don’t Create More Work]

The most insidious kind of bullshit work is the bullshit work that you create for other people via your communication style or lack there of.

As a very subtle example, this week, I was asked by person Z if I had talked to person X who had in-bounded about Y. I said no, I hadn't.

Person Z proceeds to message me, saying great, I'll tell person X that you'll email them.

Now this might seem like a benign response from Person Z, but it actually creates work for me that simply should not exist. Now I have to:

1. Find Person X's contact info in our system of record

2. Guess at or ask Person Z what they’ve already told Person X

3. Write and send an email to Person Z that has that context in mind

None of this work is remotely necessary. The fact that it’s ‘not a lot of work’ doesn’t really matter, because it’s all a bunch of extra steps that I now have to do.

If instead of sending a message to Person X saying I would message them, Person Z would have copied me on her reply to person X saying I would take over, items 1 and 2 would be deleted, and item 3 would be easier to do.

This would have been 0 marginal work for Person Z. It is the same amount of effort as her applying to person X directly.

If it seems like I am splitting hairs over something small here, it's because these things add up. If this sort of comms style is not a big deal to you, you might be in a corporate setting that can support this sort of thing.

The difference between getting 0 of these messages a day and 5 of them can be anywhere from 10-15 additional micro items you need to do. If you don’t batch them all at once and are context switching, that really is a lot.

I value my time a TON. I, for one, don't want those additional items!

As a matter of fact, I'm deathly allergic to them.

To be clear, this isn't to say that when Jack and I communicate, this sort of thing never happens; I'm sure it does every once in a while. But, we both greatly respect our own time and each other's time and are very conscious about not wasting it to prove some convoluted point about how much work and motion we’re doing.

The person who sent me this particular message is quite the opposite, and almost always finds a way to create more bullshit work like this.

As an aside, this kind of communicator often overlaps with the person who sends an open ended message about something they're worried about. This is a classic bullshit work generator because now your job is to parse out their emotional state from real concerns and then propose a solution if appropriate. And often times, there's an implication in this sort of message that the other person wants you to solve this problem. This creates both more work and more cortisol.

Very efficient people consistently make an effort to create less work with their communications, not more.

[AI Slop Bombs]

One last, new class of communication that creates bullshit work is the AI Slop Bomb: when someone sends you a verbose message clearly written by an LLM full of action items.

These messages are very frustrating and I would argue selfish, too. It's one thing to use an LLM to summarize or recap a conversation and extract agreed upon action items, it's another thing to use an LLM to create tasks that aren't real.

I recently sent someone a proposal, and got back an LLM written response with 3 or 4 overlapping and vague clarifying questions that revealed no real comprehension of the underlying document. It was the type of response that 'looked' real but didn't mean anything.

I truly believe this was selfish and inconsiderate of the other person. I had to parse through machine generated text to try to find the actual concerns this person had. I responded, clarifying a few points and articulating what I thought he was asking for.

We got on the phone, and he read back the concerns that the LLM told him were important. We came to a working resolution, I drafted the changes and sent back a new proposal. Once again, he responded with an LLM. One of the questions was literally asking for clarification about a definition that an entire fucking exhibit was dedicated to.

By not actually just reading and processing the document, or validating what the LLM was saying, this person is creating more work for me that I don't want to & shouldn't have to do. I'll send a very short response to each point, but would be lying if I said I didn't consider volleying AI slop back.

LLMs amplify our ability to create bullshit work, which is a very unfortunate thing for all of us.

I don’t even known what I write about anymore, but subscribe if you like it - I’m here each Sunday.

[Do the Hard Thing]

All hope is not lost.

If anything, from a competitive standpoint, the amount of people doing bullshit work should make it easier for you to get an out-sized return by doing real work. And maybe, if enough of us do that, we'll turn the tide against nonsense.

Remember, this real work is inherently challenging by definition.

On one end, it might be the deep work that is harder to do than shallow work. Hence, less people do it, and the return for doing it is higher.

On the other end, it might be that the real work is a certain kind of uncomfortable situation you've been avoiding (a weak spot, if you will). If you've been avoiding this thing, then it's likely that it's also where the comparatively 'easy wins' are hiding.

A weak point of mine is I don't approach random people in public. Heard three guys talking about a startup they were building in the park the other day, but didn't do anything. They could be future guests at one of my hacker house's events or even residents.

So, I told a cop in the coffee shop thank you for his service while writing this. Small start. Find the weak spot and break it, or the muscle that atrophied and grow it.

The more you focus on identifying and doing the high leverage thing, the cooler the outcomes you'll get. With BirdDog, as I've been overcoming my fear of building a product that users can use without talking to us, we've already been seeing some very attractive outcomes.

It's been hard product work, but I know right now this & articulating these changes to the market are more important than anything else for the outcome we want.

Live Deeply,