Falling Behind is Good, Actually

Or, why your best work can come from not being 'on top of things'

On his Stanford faculty page, computer scientist Donald Knuth wrote, "I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990."

That was the day Knuth stopped using email.

"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things," Knuth explains. "But my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study."

I love this. Knuth uncovers here, in the distinction between being "on top of things" vs. "on the bottom of things," one of the most important career decisions you'll never be asked to make explicitly.

Many of us prioritise proactivity – that's the direction the productivity zeitgeist propels us. We default to trying to stay on top of things, however Sisyphean it may feel. We pride ourselves on quick responses, staying current with trends, and being plugged into every conversation. In the process, we can easily confuse being informed with being effective.

Being on top of things often means sacrificing depth of engagement; skating across the surface of things. Knowing a little about everything and a lot about nothing. Being reactive rather than creative, and responsive rather than generative.

This is the hole in which I frequently find myself, drowning in a sea of notifications which ebb and flow like a tide. I often feel like the man trying to sail with a hole in his boat, emptying out the water with a small bucket, assuming I'll eventually be able to patch things up when I finally get to the bottom.

But being on the bottom of things requires an entirely different mindset. It means descending into the depths of something until you understand its fundamental principles. And staying in one place long enough to see the things others miss.

Choosing depth over breadth may seem an easy decision when we're talking about studying. But when it comes to your tasks and your attention, it's hard to fight inertia.

Knuth has spent decades working on "The Art of Computer Programming," a multi-volume work that has become the definitive text in its field. This isn't work you can do while checking Slack notifications or responding to "urgent" emails. It requires what he calls "uninterruptible concentration"—the kind of focus that our always-on culture makes nearly impossible.

Cal Newport has been a massive proponent of this in his book Deep Work. The irony is that our information age has made deep work both more valuable and more difficult than ever.

While the velocity of our days encourages most of us to skim the surface, those who carve room to dive deep create disproportionate value. But the very tools that give us access to infinite information also fragment our attention in ways that prevent us from processing any of it deeply.

The cost of staying on top of things is the opportunity cost of never going deep enough to do our best work. The benefit of being on the bottom of things is the compound interest of sustained attention applied to important problems.

Knuth's email policy sacrifices the wonder of technology and the possibility of knowing a little about everything, in order to escape the tyranny of other people's urgencies. He's protecting his most valuable resource—not his time, but his ability to think deeply about complex problems.

There's room for nuance here. Different types of valuable work require different relationships with information and communication. But it's worth examining the default that you must be on top of everything at all times.

There's a decent chance you've once been pulled into a meeting for two hours, come back, and everything was where you left it. Or, in some cases, people were able to solve their own problems in your absence. If that's true, then you actually have an hour or two that people are prepared to wait, but you'd prefer to imagine that's not the case, because scurrying around feels good. It feels useful—productive.

But if your rushing means you're always shipping the bare minimum instead of work you can be proud of, it may be worth hitting pause.

The question isn't whether you can afford to disconnect. The question is whether you can afford not to.

What would happen if you spent less time staying current and more time going deep? What could you create if you stopped trying to be on top of everything and chose to be on the bottom of something important?