If I were to say to you, “You know what would be a great way to build a car? Put all the necessary parts in the middle of the factory floor, scattered around the chassis, then ask each person to grab their tools and come up and do their bit,” you’d think I was crazy.
And yet, this is how most knowledge work projects seem to be organised.
We plonk a project or a challenge in front of a group of people and say, “You’re a team now. Work as a team. But you’re autonomous and self-organised. Get the things you need, meet when you want, produce results.” And for some reason, we think that’s going to work well.
I know knowledge work is producing something different to a car. It’s often based on transferring hard-won skills, knowledge, experience and understanding, through deep thought, analysis, categorisation, and problem solving, into something outcome-based.
So why the parallel?
Because the current way isn’t working.
The breakthrough in the early twentieth century of the ‘Production Line’—where the team workers stayed still and pulled the car chassis to their station along a pre-determined production route when they had capacity—increased productivity many-fold. Scraping my memory banks, I think early cars used to take something like 12 hours to build in the ‘craft’ model (as I described in the opening). Come the Production Line, it was less than 1.5 hours.
Knowledge work is still fumbling around in the 12-hour mark. There hasn’t been, in many industries, the significant leap in productivity. Research from Asana shows that knowledge workers spend around 60% of their time on ‘work about work’, not productive tasks. Surprised? Me neither.
This is nothing to do with hybrid, remote or office working. This is nothing to do with four-day weeks. This is to do with clear outcomes, clear ways of working, and removal of distractions.
What Happened to Autonomy?
The term ‘knowledge work’ was first popularised by Peter Drucker in the 1950s and 60s. He later observed in the 1990s:
“Knowledge workers must be autonomous. They must know more about their job than anyone else in the organisation. For this reason, they must be responsible for their productivity and quality of work.” — Peter Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999)
I propose a distinction between autonomous process and autonomous fulfilment—or, to put it another way, productivity and quality.
Autonomous, self-emerging productivity processes, in the current climate, seem to lead to people fumbling around, sending lots of emails, messages, and meetings. It isn’t clear who’s doing what or why. See Cal Newport’s definition of the Hyperactive Hive Mind, where unscheduled communication via emails and instant messages dominates the workday, undermining focus and flow. — Cal Newport, A World Without Email (2021)
Process should be observed, crafted, and continuously improved. Like the Production Line.
How we get things done is where autonomy should remain—to ensure quality. When the work is in my court, let me work out how to play it to achieve the outcome to a high standard, using my skill as a knowledge worker.
A Lean-Inspired ‘Production Line’ for Knowledge Work
A great knowledge work ‘Production Line’ equivalent will come from Lean thinking. This could include doing things like:
Map the steps currently taken from trigger/request through to value fulfilment.
Limit how much work can sit in any one part of the process—less is more.
Set entry and exit criteria to ensure quality at each step.
Pull work into your step only when you have capacity—never push.
Observe delays or bottlenecks (often approvals or key-person dependencies)—can you redesign, eliminate, or scale them?
Continuously improve the system based on what you observe.
I’ve tried this many times over the years. I remember one Marketing team who did this and reduced the time it took to produce campaigns by about 20%, improved the quality, and were able to experiment more often to see what landed best with audiences.
It works.
So… How Is Your Organisation Running Knowledge Work Projects?
Is everyone standing around the work in the middle, trying their best but delivering little?
Or is your work flowing—clear, limited, and effective?
References
Drucker, P. F. Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999)
How good at you at saying ‘no’ to the things that don’t matter?
Struggling? There’s got to be a better way.
In part it’s because we don’t often spend time working out what it is that we do want to get done. Or why those things matter to us. So what happens is, we end up saying ‘yes’ to everything because we don’t know what’s important.
My tried and tested VAPOR framework changes all of that. It puts you back in control of your goals, provides a clear way to get after them, live your life in alignment with what you believe is important, and allows you to say ‘no’ to extraneous nonsense. I use it every day to get closer to what I want to achieve and focus on the really important stuff that allows me to fill my day with the things that matter to me. In the last year, it’s allowed me to write and produce a play for the theatre (something I haven’t done since I was a student), lose more weight than I’ve done in the decade previous with yo-yo dieting, and complete a coaching and facilitation course alongside my substantive consulting job.
VAPOR stands for:
Values
Activities
Plans
Organisation
Reflection
Each part of the framework has associated activities with them and should be followed in order.
Values
What are your values? A simple question with seismic implications. And often a question we don’t ponder. Or if we do, we land on nebulous things that aren’t quite right or don’t really resonate. I’m going to offer two ways to get to your values.
Option 1: Ask a simpler question, but sit with it for a long time.
Instead of ‘what are my values?’, ask ‘what do I value?’. A really subtle shift, but is simpler to sit with.
Give yourself an hour and that question. Write down every response you can think of for about 30 minutes: I value laughter, I value fun, I value my family, I value subversiveness, I value betterness (it doesn’t matter if you make words up). Then read each one out loud and see what you notice. If it feels right, keep it; if there’s something not quite right, ditch it; if there’s duplication or themes, theme them.
You should end up with about 4-6 core values.
or
Option 2: Revisit your life so far, looking for clues.
This technique is about looking for pivotal moments in your life. Think back, or better still, find a friend who’ll listen to you for a bit and ask them to help you notice the moments.
Go through the story of your life, from childhood, and notice moments of change – where you used to do things one way, and then you found another way; or where change happened to you and you had to learn something else. Behind these moments of change resonates values. The things that are inherently important to us provoke us to act differently in these moments, they force us to focus on what really matters to us. They could be when you decided to take up a particular hobby or pastime, when you stuck with something at a moment you could have given up, when you discovered you were a party animal, or when you got home and realised nothing would ever be the same.
These moments of your story pull out the things that matter to you.
As with option 1, sit with that list of things: ‘tenacity seems to be important to me; I seem to tbe the kind of person who values helping others’ and keep the ones that resonate, and park the ones that don’t any more. Maybe those ones served you really well at that moment of change, but might not be as important for you right now.
Again, theme them so that you end up with 4-6 core values.
Shortcut
I’m going to suggest a few things that I value which you might too:
Craft – getting better at skills that matter to you – they could be work or personal.
Connection – connecting to yourself, your partner, family, friends, and society.
Health – your physical, mental and financial health.
Creativity – making something that wasn’t there before.
Activities
Identifying a regular activity you do around each of your values.
I deliberately haven’t used the term ‘habit’ here, because I don’t enjoy the pressure that comes with that term. I can valuemy physical health, but it doesn’t mean I have to go for a run every day. However, if I do have a set of regular activities, like going to the gym, taking classes, going for a long walk or a jog, and staying under a certain number of calories for the week, then I can say I value my health.
For each of your values, think about some things you can do to show to yourself that you take this value seriously.
They should be easy enough to be able to fit into most days, but difficult enough that they require some effort. The effort is important in terms of the story we tell ourselves that ‘doing this means I take it seriously’.
Some examples for my values:
For my craft, I regularly listen to podcasts, read a book instead of picking up my phone, and use the VAPOR planning framework.
For connection, I go to the pub on a Friday night with my wife and we chat about the week, and I donate regularly to charity.
For health, I take part in exercise activities, write a journal, and take a weekend walk in nature.
For creativity, I play the piano and do some automatic writing a couple of times per week.
Plans
Establishing what you plan to achieve according to your values.
No that you have the foundations of living a life in alignment with your values, you can set to the task of planning out what you want to achieve in accordance with your values. This will give you a clear indication of what things you want to be better or different over various time horizons, and will also give you the ammunition to say ‘no’ when other things come up.
I suggest planning at the quarterly, weekly, and daily scale. And sometimes annual if helpful for you. But mostly, we can make decent headway on the things we want to achieve in a quarter.
For each value, plan to achieve one thing in the next quarter. Depending how many values you have identified, you may decide that in some quarters you don’t have any activities for that value – and that’s ok if it’s an intentional gap. For me, for example, if I’ve had a particularly creative couple of quarters, I might deliberately decide to take a break to allow myself to recharge. I still value creativity, and will still keep up the regular activities, but may choose not to have a specific plan on the go.
So, for example, you may decide that for your craft, you plan to acquire a new qualification in the next quarter. Or for connection, you might plan to see friends or family that you haven’t caught up with for a while. For your financial health, you may plan to finally set up that budget you’ve been meaning to do forever. There’s no fancy format, just write down the thing you want to be better or different in the next three months against the value.
If you want to get a bit more advanced or ambitious in your planning, you can set out levels of accomplishment – from commitment (you definitely want this), to challenge (it’ll be tough, but possible), to crushing-it (if everything works in your favour, perhaps this will happen).
The joy of planning in this way, is you’ve always got a good answer if someone asks to add something to your plate. If the project is in alignment with your values and you haven’t got anything on this quarter, maybe you say ‘yes’. If it’s in alignment with your values but you’ve already got something on this quarter, you can say you’d love to do it, but you’re already planning to achieve X, Y, and Z this quarter – perhaps you could consider it when you do your next quarterly plan. If it’s not in alignment with your values and you already know what you want to achieve, it’s much easier to say ‘no’ because you already know what and why you are doing and how you intend to spend your time: ‘I’m already planning to achieve A, B, and C this quarter, so I’m not going to be able to plan in your project’.
Having the regular planning rhythm and the intention to achieve things in alignment with your values makes conversations about adding more in so much more easy. It also helps keep you happier and more fulfilled, because you’re always working towards something that matters to you.
Organisation
The organisational steps to keep momentum with your plan.
OK, so you now have your quarterly plan and you need to get organised to make it happen. The next step is to look at this quarterly plan every week. I suggest doing this on a Friday. Each Friday, look at the quarterly plan and write a plan for the week that will get you a step closer to each goal. Maybe this week you want to read a chapter of a particular study book, practice a new technique, run 1km further.
Write down your weekly plan.
Keep it realistic – there’s no need to overstretch yourself. If in doubt, cut the plan down to about 60% of what you first think you can do in a week. Better to achieve that than to be left feeling like you haven’t met your goals. If you have extra time you want to fill, at least now you’ve got a quarterly plan to go to and take action on that.
Then, every morning, check your weekly plan and pick out the things you plan to do today. Sometimes this will be decided in advance for you (e.g. a class is always on Wednesday), sometimes you have autonomy to decide. The key is to be intentional about your plans and your time. If you don’t plan how you want to use your time, someone else sure will – whether that’s your boss, Slack chat, or TikTok’s algorithm.
How do you write all these plans up?
Personally, I use a Trello board. I have a column (and associated colour label) for values. Then a column for regular activities. The next column has the quarterly plans, a weekly plan backlog column, then a doing and done column for each day. Cards can be colour coded with the values, so I can see at a glance that I’m living a balanced life, and the quarterly plans have checklists to tick off various points along a journey, such as weight-loss markers, or number of words written for a book.
Reflections
At the end of each week and each quarter, take time to reflect on what you’ve achieved.
It’s a moment of celebration and of learning. Perhaps you crushed some goals and missed targets on others. Maybe you let your regular activities slip or your plans got waylaid by a new project or social crisis.
What matters is you take time to reflect, learn and take lessons into the next quarter. If you’re always overcommitting, only take one or two quarterly goals into the next quarter, and cut the weekly and daily plans to about 60%. If you find that you’re super creative on Friday mornings, then plan to do your creative work then.
I hope the VAPOR planning framework is useful for you. It’s been fantastic to help me achieve more of the things I want to achieve, live a life in alignment with my values, and be able to say no to the things that don’t fit.
I believe strongly in ‘betterness’ (my made-up word from earlier) and so, I use Dieter Rams’ famous quote to inspire this lifestyle: “Less, but better.”
Less, but better
Dieter Rams
Good luck using it, and let me know how you get on.
Sam Grayston 