Now, my employers can rest assured: I don’t mean that title literally!

When I say “never do any work”, here is what I mean:

  • There is a strict upper limit to how hard you can work and how much you can work. There is a level of intensity beyond which you cannot push yourself, and there is a number of hours-per-week beyond which you cannot work.
  • There is no limit on how smart you work. You usually cannot work 10x as hard, but you can always work 10x or 100x or 1000x as smart.
  • Thus, working in smarter ways—not working harder—is the key to unlocking 10x or 100x or 1000x as much impact as you otherwise would.
  • Examples of working smarter: spending more of your time on prioritising projects to make sure you are working on the highest-impact projects; automating your work.
  • Thus, if you have already picked your projects well, then automation is a very powerful way to create more impact than you otherwise would. That is, a powerful way to achieve some goal X is to build tools that do X.
  • Many authors, including Greg McKeown among numerous others, correctly point out that such tools provide large value because they continue to work over time. But I would go one step further: if you design high-quality tools that achieve well-chosen goals, then these tools are a way to achieve far more of your goal X than you could possibly hope to achieve otherwise. There is an upper limit to how many hours you work each week, but there is no upper limit to the number and quality of these tools you can build.
  • To be more concrete, when I say “produce a tool”, this could be producing some mechanism or software that literally produces X on its own (e.g. writing the code for an automatically updating dashboard that visualises important, up-to-date variables relevant for an NGO; incubating projects and hiring the right people to take over those projects) or producing some mechanism or software that frees up your time and attention so you have additional capacity to pursue X yourself (e.g. automating your monthly budgeting).
  • This is basically saying the same thing as the “leverage through meta” idea popular in EA circles—and thus also the “meta trap” warning!
  • The “meta trap” warning is very important, because it shows that even the power of automated tools are not a free lunch. In particular, the need for good monitoring and evaluation (which already should be a core activity of every philanthropic project) becomes more pressing, as you have more projects and more moving parts per project (code must be maintained and debugged, outputs must be checked for accuracy, and the larger theory of change must still be monitored).
  • And it should go without saying that there are times in life when it is appropriate to work very hard. In particular, there are many people (in fact, this is most people) who do not have the freedom or ability to offload their work in this way, and I’m speaking from a place of immense privilege.
  • Nevertheless, if you are rigorous and careful, then adopting the mindset of “never do any work” can be a way to do immense amounts of good for the sentient beings living on this rock that we call home.