At the same time, however, Gladwell, Lewis, and Packer don’t feel like the service offers them nearly enough advantages to offset its negatives in their particular circumstances. Lewis, for example, worries that adding more accessibility will sap his energy and reduce his ability to research and write great stories, noting: “It’s amazing how overly accessible people are. There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.” While Packer, for his part, worries about distraction, saying: “Twitter is crack for media addicts.” He goes so far as to describe Carr’s rave about the service as “the most frightening picture of the future that I’ve read thus far in the new decade.”
We don’t have to argue about whether these authors are right in their personal decisions to avoid Twitter (and similar tools), because their sales numbers and awards speak for themselves. We can instead use these decisions as a courageous illustration of the craftsman approach to tool selection in action. In a time when so many knowledge workers—and especially those in creative fields—are still trapped in the any-benefit mind-set, it’s refreshing to see a more mature approach to sorting through such services. But the very rareness of these examples reminds us that mature and confident assessments of this type aren’t easy to make. Recall the complexity of the thought process, highlighted earlier, that Forrest Pritchard had to slog through to make a decision on his hay baler: For many knowledge workers, and many of the tools in their lives, these decisions will be equally complex. The goal of this strategy, therefore, is to offer some structure to this thought process—a way to reduce some of the complexity of deciding which tools really matter to you.
The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life. If you have a family, for example, then your personal goals might involve parenting well and running an organized household. In the professional sphere, the details of these goals depend on what you do for a living. In my own work as a professor, for example, I pursue two important goals, one centered on being an effective teacher in the classroom and effective mentor to my graduate students, and another centered on being an effective researcher. While your goals will likely differ, the key is to keep the list limited to what’s most important and to keep the descriptions suitably high-level. (If your goal includes a specific target—“to reach a million dollars in sales” or “to publish a half dozen papers in a single year”—then it’s too specific for our purposes here.) When you’re done you should have a small number of goals for both the personal and professional areas of your life.
Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal. These activities should be specific enough to allow you to clearly picture doing them. On the other hand, they should be general enough that they’re not tied to a onetime outcome. For example, “do better research” is too general (what does it look like to be “doing better research”?), while “finish paper on broadcast lower bounds in time for upcoming conference submission” is too specific (it’s a onetime outcome). A good activity in this context would be something like: “regularly read and understand the cutting-edge results in my field.”
The next step in this strategy is to consider the network tools you currently use. For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity. Now comes the important decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.
To help illustrate this strategy in action, let’s consider a case study. For the purposes of this example, assume that Michael Lewis, if asked, would have produced the following goal and corresponding important activities for his writing career.
Professional Goal: To craft well-written, narrative-driven stories that change the way people understand the world.
Key Activities Supporting This Goal:
? Research patiently and deeply.
? Write carefully and with purpose.
Now imagine that Lewis was using this goal to determine whether or not to use Twitter. Our strategy requires him to investigate Twitter’s impact on the key activities he listed that support his goal. There’s no convincing way to argue that Twitter would make Lewis substantially better at either of these activities. Deep research for Lewis, I assume, requires him to spend weeks and months getting to know a small number of sources (he’s a master of the long-form journalism skill of drawing out a source’s story over many sessions), and careful writing, of course, requires freedom from distraction. In both cases, Twitter at best has no real impact, and at worst could be substantially negative, depending on Lewis’s susceptibility to the service’s addictive attributes. The conclusion would therefore be that Lewis shouldn’t use Twitter.
You might argue at this point that confining our example to this single goal is artificial, as it ignores the areas where a service like Twitter has its best chance of contributing. For writers, in particular, Twitter is often presented as a tool to establish connections with your audience that ultimately lead to more sales. For a writer like Michael Lewis, however, marketing doesn’t likely merit its own goal when he assesses what’s important in his professional life. This follows because his reputation guarantees that he will receive massive coverage in massively influential media channels, if the book is really good. His focus, therefore, is much more productively applied to the goal of writing the best possible book than instead trying to squeeze out a few extra sales through inefficient author-driven means. In other words, the question is not whether Twitter has some conceivable benefit to Lewis; it’s instead whether Twitter use significantly and positively affects the most important activities in his professional life.
What about a less famous writer? In this case, book marketing might play a more primary role in his or her goals. But when forced to identify the two or three most important activities supporting this goal, it’s unlikely that the type of lightweight one-on-one contact enabled by Twitter would make the list. This is the result of simple math. Imagine that our hypothetical author diligently sends ten individualized tweets a day, five days a week—each of which connects one-on-one with a new potential reader. Now imagine that 50 percent of the people contacted in this manner become loyal fans who will definitely buy the author’s next book. Over the two-year period it might take to write this book, this yields two thousand sales—a modest boost at best in a marketplace where bestseller status requires two or three times more sales per week. The question once again is not whether Twitter offers some benefits, but instead whether it offers enough benefits to offset its drag on your time and attention (two resources that are especially valuable to a writer).
Having seen an example of this approach applied to a professional context, let’s next consider the potentially more disruptive setting of personal goals. In particular, let’s apply this approach to one of our culture’s most ubiquitous and fiercely defended tools: Facebook.
When justifying the use of Facebook (or similar social networks), most people cite its importance to their social lives. With this in mind, let’s apply our strategy to understand whether Facebook makes the cut due to its positive impact on this aspect of our personal goals. To do so, we’ll once again work with a hypothetical goal and key supporting activities.
Personal Goal: To maintain close and rewarding friendships with a group of people who are important to me.
Key Activities Supporting This Goal:
1. Regularly take the time for meaningful connection with those who are most important to me (e.g., a long talk, a meal, joint activity).
2. Give of myself to those who are most important to me (e.g., making nontrivial sacrifices that improve their lives).