Canonically, Businesses seem to separate their internal functions product functions into 2 distinct categories. The first grouping contains things that will affect the bottom line in 5 minutes, 2 weeks, 3 months or up to 5 years, a clearly defined temporal window.The second group is one that focuses on moonshot-y projects that may or may not change the trajectory of the Business, their industry or perhaps the world at large.
Terms we may all be familiar with that describe these two groupings are;
- Production
- Research & Development
Separating these two functions has let organizations keep the head-in-the-cloud/lofy types away from the clutches of the organizational processes that actually get the job done for corporations. This frees up the resources in these folks heads and in the organization to be able to pursue objectives that would be out of question or perhaps even ridiculous for a purely production focused system/team.
The separation of powers (if you will allow me the phrasing) ultimately lets the organization play to the strengths of these two rather different ends of the work spectrum and is a separation we see for Entities like Facebook/Meta with FAIR being separated from production AI development, or Google with their Brain division being distinct from their primary engineering effort. Companies that are not large enough to run both of these functions internally seem to then focus on one or the other and provide the best they can within one paradigm, take tenstorrent as an example of R&D and ngrok as an example of Production. Upon inspection it rather makes sense, you need to bring home a win somewhere and if you are resource constrained your best bet is to go all in on the thing you reckon you can achieve (place all your eggs in the most plausible basket). On the other hand if you have resources (and talent) you might as well cast a wider net and try to compete in many different dimensions, hoping that a few of the things that your net catches are awesome and not just more unnecessary bugs.
These paradigms also have fundamental differences in the inputs & outputs they work with. R&D being a resource intensive endeavor that is a bit more of a risky investment, in that it may or may not pay off – and Production being about using as few resources as possible, generally prioritizing efficiency and execution over innovation. These two objectives need to be worked towards and instead of having them exist side-by-side, in the same Area of Operation, they get segregated into bins and can work on their products more independently than if they were a single unit.
This mechanism of thinking seems to work well in the competitive landscape of Business – and is an abstraction that makes sense to bring over to your personal life.
Internal Separations of Work
Similar to the work that is done by an Organization, an Individual also does things that fall under these two categories (more or less depending on the Individual, their Work and their Interests). We can swap out the actual names of divisions at IBM for terms more closely related to what we do each day (that are roughly analogous to the Biz terms)
- Productivity
- Research
Productivity for the Individual basically encompasses all of the items on your checklist. Tasks that are accompanied by or exist as clearly defined bullet points are tasks conducive to being on a Checklist. Being productive is easy (if your life is in order and you know how to keep things ordered so that you are in a position to be productive), all you need to do is taxonomize your tasks clearly and concisely and then go about checking things off, if there is ambiguity then do some digging and refining until you have action items clear enough to go on a checklist. Production and Productivity are all about being able to Operate and Execute on established Objectives within some Rules of Engagement and with some Assets.
Research is a bit more tricky, it is much more time intensive as the reason why you are endeavoring to do this work is because you do not know what you are doing. Research leads to being able to “productionize” things and this phrase is what you will hear in organizations when things come into favor or the cards line up for some interesting developments to be integrated into products or services. I would also go as far as to say that Research is much more painful, it requires more compute in the same way solving abstract math problems is more resource intensive that editing your website’s CSS (although the checklist item for one is much longer than the other, the checklist does not really grasp the challenge within the understanding of concepts). Research is all about doing non-trivial things that do not have an explicit payoff. The lessons you learn in the R&D phase of a topic, project, domain, etc. may pave the way to productionizing those lessons or to being able to accomplish more within checklists, but that is not known a priori and it is only after doing the voluntary suffering of learning something hard that you may find that there is no direct application of the lessons that were just learned.
Separating these two or at least understanding that the Tasks you need to take on in order to win (in life) fall into these two broad categories let’s you better plan how to distribute resources to be successful within domains.