Thinking and Doing work
The push and pull between those who do and those who think about work
During the last year, I have had a push and pull over the kind of work I love doing. I have thought deeply about what I currently do and whether it aligns with what I want to do in the future. This has led me to think through the kind of work I see daily.
Over the course of my career, I have done a lot of what I call “Doing” work. I like the term because it gives the idea of activity, you need to wake up every day and be hands-on with the craft. As a designer, particularly an IC, I spend most of my time showing tangible results. Sketching flow, synthesizing ideas and bringing them to life in some shape. Doing work involves a lot of time and attention to detail if you want to create great products. As such, a lot of patience is required when doing work. It is easy to assume the work is not moving as fast when you’re a Thinking work person.
Thinking work requires vision. Being able to see and imagine things that do not exist yet. As humans, we are always thinking as such, people who do a lot of thinking work are able to work through the entire day. Thinking work tends to be proactive. Detail is not a clear prerequisite while Thinking work. However, when sharing the ideas and thoughts you have, it is important to be as clear as possible.
As a professional, depending on the level of ambiguity of the problems you solve, the balance between the amount of thinking and doing work you engage in can skew to either side. Early in your career, you’ll most likely engage in a lot more doing work than thinking work as most of the problems you solve would be well thought out for you already. Your main purpose at that time is pure execution of the ideas. More often than not, you might even have already proposed solutions as a part of the problem you’re presented with.
As you gain more experience, it is easy to become comfortable with Doing work. But you should start pushing yourself towards more thinking work till you find a healthy balance for you. Even if you can’t quite influence the kind of problems you solve, you want to be able to influence how you solve them as fast as possible. This is where true growth begins. As you become more Senior, you should have found that balance between doing and thinking work. As such, when you take the next step in your career, the path you decide on determines how that balance would shift. Taking the IC route would mean you can continue Doing work while also Thinking work. Meaning you can find problems while executing the solutions. If you decide on taking the management track, you would most likely skew more towards thinking work than doing work as your main responsibility now becomes enabling in Doing work.
It is important to understand the difference between these 2 types of work as it helps you better understand the nuance within team members and why certain people seem like they get a lot done while other might not seem that way. An understanding of the kinds of work and where you and your other team members fall in the spectrum would also help you empathise better when setting goals and expectations.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the growth from ”doing” to “thinking” work starts getting easier once people have moved past CUA (complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity) block and are now comfortable in a particular domain.
Usually for people in product development it happens earlier since your job is to enable others move past this block.
And it also shifts the way people are managed, while at the lower stages of “doing” work their tasks are very prescriptive and specific and as they go higher it becomes less and less.