“Haymaking is a good example,” he told me, not long into one of our conversations on the topic. “It’s a subject where I can give you the basic idea without having to gloss over the underlying economics.”
When Pritchard took over Smith Meadows, he explained, the farm made its own hay to use as animal feed during the winter months when grazing is impossible. Haymaking is done with a piece of equipment called a hay baler: a device you pull behind a tractor that compresses and binds dried grass into bales. If you raise animals on the East Coast there’s an obvious reason to own and operate a hay baler: Your animals need hay. Why spend money to “buy in” feed when you have perfectly good grass growing for free right in your own soil? If a farmer subscribed to the any-benefit approach used by knowledge workers, therefore, he would definitely buy a hay baler. But as Pritchard explained to me (after preemptively apologizing for a moment of snark), if a farmer actually adopted such a simplistic mind-set, “I’d be counting the days until the ‘For Sale’ sign goes up on the property.” Pritchard, like most practitioners of his trade, instead deploys a more sophisticated thought process when assessing tools. And after applying this process to the hay baler, Pritchard was quick to sell it: Smith Meadows now purchases all the hay it uses.
Here’s why…
“Let’s start by exploring the costs of making hay,” Pritchard said. “First, there’s the actual cost of fuel, and repairs, and the shed to keep the baler. You also have to pay taxes on it.” These directly measurable costs, however, were the easy part of his decision. It was instead the “opportunity costs” that required more attention. As he elaborated: “If I make hay all summer, I can’t be doing something else. For example, I now use that time instead to raise boilers [chickens meant for eating]. These generate positive cash flow, because I can sell them. But they also produce manure which I can then use to enhance my soil.” Then there’s the equally subtle issue of assessing the secondary value of a purchased bale of hay. As Pritchard explained: “When I’m buying in hay, I’m trading cash for animal protein, as well as manure (once it passes through the animals’ system), which means I am also getting more nutrients for my land in exchange for my money. I’m also avoiding compacting soils by driving heavy machinery over my ground all summer long.”
When making his final decision on the baler, Pritchard moved past the direct monetary costs, which were essentially a wash, and instead shifted his attention to the more nuanced issue of the long-term health of his fields. For the reasons described previously, Pritchard concluded that buying in hay results in healthier fields. And as he summarized: “Soil fertility is my baseline.” By this calculation, the baler had to go.
Notice the complexity of Pritchard’s tool decision. This complexity underscores an important reality: The notion that identifying some benefit is sufficient to invest money, time, and attention in a tool is near laughable to people in his trade. Of course a hay baler offers benefits—every tool at the farm supply store has something useful to offer. At the same time, of course it offers negatives as well. Pritchard expected this decision to be nuanced. He began with a clear baseline—in his case, that soil health is of fundamental importance to his professional success—and then built off this foundation toward a final call on whether to use a particular tool.
I propose that if you’re a knowledge worker—especially one interested in cultivating a deep work habit—you should treat your tool selection with the same level of care as other skilled workers, such as farmers. Following is my attempt to generalize this assessment strategy. I call it the craftsman approach to tool selection, a name that emphasizes that tools are ultimately aids to the larger goals of one’s craft.
The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
Notice that this craftsman approach to tool selection stands in opposition to the any-benefit approach. Whereas the any-benefit mind-set identifies any potential positive impact as justification for using a tool, the craftsman variant requires that these positive impacts affect factors at the core of what’s important to you and that they outweigh the negatives.
Even though the craftsman approach rejects the simplicity of the any-benefit approach, it doesn’t ignore the benefits that currently drive people to network tools, or make any advance proclamations about what’s “good” or “bad” technology: It simply asks that you give any particular network tool the same type of measured, nuanced accounting that tools in other trades have been subjected to throughout the history of skilled labor.
The three strategies that follow in this rule are designed to grow your comfort with abandoning the any-benefit mind-set and instead applying the more thoughtful craftsman philosophy in curating the tools that lay claim to your time and attention. This guidance is important because the craftsman approach is not cut-and-dry. Identifying what matters most in your life, and then attempting to assess the impacts of various tools on these factors, doesn’t reduce to a simple formula—this task requires practice and experimentation. The strategies that follow provide some structure for this practice and experimentation by forcing you to reconsider your network tools from many different angles. Combined, they should help you cultivate a more sophisticated relationship with your tools that will allow you to take back enough control over your time and attention to enable the rest of the ideas in Part 2 to succeed.
Apply the Law of the Vital Few to Your Internet Habits
Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t use Twitter. In a 2013 interview he explained why: “Who says my fans want to hear from me on Twitter?” He then joked: “I know a lot of people would like to see less of me.” Michael Lewis, another mega-bestselling author, also doesn’t use the service, explaining in The Wire: “I don’t tweet, I don’t Twitter, I couldn’t even tell you how to read or where to find a Twitter message.” And as mentioned in Part 1, the award-winning New Yorker scribe George Packer also avoids the service, and indeed only recently even succumbed to the necessity of owning a smartphone.
These three writers don’t think Twitter is useless. They’re quick to accept that other writers find it useful. Packer’s admission of non-Twitter use, in fact, was written as a response to an unabashedly pro-Twitter article by the late New York Times media critic David Carr, a piece in which Carr effused:
And now, nearly a year later, has Twitter turned my brain to mush? No, I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible, and instead of spending a half-hour surfing in search of illumination, I get a sense of the day’s news and how people are reacting to it in the time that it takes to wait for coffee at Starbucks.