“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of One-On-Ones”, 2019-12-28 (; backlinks; similar):
When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad. This was shortly after I’d started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the “obvious” hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, “management”) one gets in graduate school is totally ineffective.
…One-on-ones are a management tradition at lots of tech companies, perhaps popularized by High Output Management,1 in which a manager regularly schedules time with a direct report to discuss whatever the report wants. At Wave, I’ve had one-on-ones with my manager since the time I joined, and I found them incredibly useful for helping me improve at work…mine often included:
Personal habits and self-improvements…
Project management…
Communication…
Alignment…
Uncertainties…
…Obviously, the things Eve and I talked about weren’t exactly the same as my Wave one-on-ones, though they did share some common themes. Here are some of the things we talked about that Eve thinks made the biggest difference:
Figuring out when she should be outlining new parts of her dissertation vs. fleshing out existing parts
Realizing that she was spending a lot of time reading crappy papers that she didn’t have to
Noticing when and why she was least productive (for instance, noticing when her procrastination was a coping strategy to avoid executing a plan that she didn’t really believe would succeed)
Asking for more frequent feedback from her adviser and dissertation committee
Being able to talk through anything stressful
Allowing herself space to “stare into the abyss” and confront uncomfortable possibilities (eg. is it actually worth finishing her PhD?)
In general, Eve summarized our one-on-ones as being a forcing function for her to fully decide on longer-term goals and then focus her work on the best way to achieve those goals, rather than getting too bogged down in whatever was right in front of her.
…The last thing this helped me realize is that specialists have a lot of non-specialized problems. In one sense, this is so well known it’s become a cliché—the engineer who just wants to crank out code all day, the philosophy professor with their head in the clouds. But the cliché doesn’t really describe me or most engineers or philosophers I know, who are broad-minded enough to be happy thinking about things outside our assigned specialty. Even for us, though, we can often increase our impact a lot by improving our generalized effectiveness.