In the last post (actually, two posts ago now), we saw that it can be very helpful and clarifying to define the deliverables on your projects.

This leads to the reason knowledge work can be so hard. Not hard in the sense of heavy lifting, but in the sense of — for lack of a better word — “mystifying.”

The challenge of knowledge work is that, usually, we have to define our own projects and deliverables. I often find myself looking back fondly to when I was in school, and all of the “deliverables” were handed to me on a silver platter (= syllabus).

You didn’t even really need to keep a project list — all of your “projects” were defined for you, with detail, right there in the syllabus. (Although if I had it to do over, I would keep a project list now.)

I didn’t know about David Allen back then. Yet, “knowing what you were not doing” was simple. I kept on top of things by simply saying to myself every once in a while “Hmm, I wonder what I’m supposed to be doing? Better look at the syllabi from my classes.” (That’s very GTD-ish, by the way.) This worked very well, and I actually think that there are some lessons to be learned from this (more on that down the road, hopefully).

The challenge in the world of work (and business of life, even if you are in school) is that you don’t have people defining all your projects for you. You do have people assigning you things, such as your boss. But you also have people “requesting” things. And then, for the most part, you are responsible to know what you need to do in order to accomplish the purpose of your position (or life at home — parenting, keeping up the house, etc.).

There is variation here, of course. For example, some positions might indeed largely consist of work that is defined very clearly and assigned by a boss or customer workflow or etc.

But regardless, my point is that we all have an ever-changing “syllabus,” most of which we have to create. And we have to create it in real-time.

The result is that, in addition to being skilled in actually doing our work, we also have to be skilled in defining our work. And there are some interesting trade-offs there: define your work poorly or inadequately, and the doing of your work will suffer. Additionally, time spent defining your work takes away time from doing it. On the other hand, define your work well, and that will pay off rich dividends in the doing of your work, in terms of both time savings and quality improvements.

Figuring this all out is, possibly, one of the greatest opportunities for increasing knowledge worker productivity on a large scale — and bringing more sanity to life at the individual level as well.