5 objectives of “knowledge work” for the ordinary person

If an undeniably significant amount of our time is spent on the exchange of information, why not view knowledge work as a life skill? What would it look like if we took some sort of collective action that extended beyond industry silos and class, to learn how to manage information together in a better way?

This extends beyond the critical thinking, media literacy and news literacy taught in K-12 and college. I’m thinking of things like Tiago Forte’s Second Brain course (highly inaccessible to most people), the principles in Deep Work (gets only slightly closer in terms of access), and all the conversations about the future of work being collectively imagined in a post-pandemic world.

In this vein, I thought it would be fun to put together a quick list of what I think the objectives of “knowledge work” should be for the ordinary person.

What does a human being need to know today in order to live well in a rapidly changing world? If we collectively spent more time developing our thoughts and skills around big questions, what would they be?

Here are 5 ideas I’ve written down, straight from my notebook.

5 objectives of “knowledge work” for the ordinary person

1️⃣ How to die well:

Religion has long owned the market on this one and our views on life and death, intentionally developed or not, drive a lot of our behavior. Even if fewer people are getting their answers to these questions from religion, shouldn’t we have the chance to wonder together about how to approach death?

I recommend the book, The Lost Art of Dying, as a great place to start. It is rich with perspective on how to approach health and life.

In particular, I have been taking notes on what an effective shift away from a paternalistic relationship with medicine can look like (i.e.: being a passive recipient of someone else’s expertise) because I think we need to shift away from paternalism in the media too. More on this in a future issue.

2️⃣ How to become comfortable navigating plurality:

Per last week’s issue and ongoing questions about how to navigate a world in which we have access to multiple versions of reality, multiple value systems and multiple preferences in our modes of survival, navigating plurality is something we need to actively teach ourselves.

I think there are a few entry points to this: intrapersonal (what makes us as individuals feel safe or unsafe), interpersonal (where do our biases lie and which ones are useful?), and sociological (how do we exchange norms as groups?). Asking ourselves any of these questions would provide important clues about how we can feel better in a diverse society.

3️⃣ How to define value for ourselves

I think we’ve inherited way too much language from economics and politics to define our value systems, without realizing how archaic most economic and political framing is. Value can be measured in so many ways — in money, in time, in consensus, in action, in health, in social fulfillment, and so forth. We don’t all have to optimize for the same things or be angry at the dominant value system. We can choose our own values and optimize for those.

4️⃣ How to measure and understand progress

I was happy to see NYT’s new Headway Initiative this week because I think journalists and historians can play an important role in this one, and both professions could lend their skills to building a more robust knowledge base on how things have changed, rather than what’s true or false. Here’s an interesting read from a couple of years ago on progress studies.

5️⃣ How to structure our time intentionally

In Deep Work, Newport writes in Rule #4: Drain the Shallows:

To summarize, the motivation for this strategy is the recognition that a deep work habit requires you to treat your time with respect. A good first step toward this respectful handling is the advice outlined here: Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday. It’s natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it’s undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.

I love that he calls out the distrust of structure because it is so real. Who wants to do the hard work of structuring our time and knowledge intentionally?

How limiting this can feel in a world that romanticizes freedom and serendipity, especially in the discovery of content.

But: this is the very reason that the most insightful guidance on health, well-being, time and information management is marketed exclusively to “knowledge workers” as productivity advice. Guidance that all of us could benefit from.

In summary: Knowledge work, which requires the skills to manage time, information, contradictions and the feelings they produce in us is an absolutely necessary life skill for today’s news consumer and news producer. And most of us are now both.