Some Thoughts on Operations
A pragmatic pastiche
Context/background: I’ve worked in the past as a Program Administrator at the Yale Child Study Center, and taught English at the high school and undergraduate level. Recently, I started a new legal operations job at an organization called Open Philanthropy. The following observations come primarily out of these professional experiences.
All work is, to some extent, operations work because all work implicates a how: A pitcher must release the ball from a certain grip and angle; an actress must develop certain techniques and systems to remember her lines; a line cook must flip patties using a certain method. Jobs called “operations” are simply those which place a particular emphasis on how (process) relative to what (product)—but in reality this is a difference in degree, not in kind.
The proper operations mindset is two parts golden retriever, one part Larry David.1 The golden retriever embodies a doggedness in the pursuit of goals, a willingness to chew repeatedly on banal problems, and a tendency to be happiest when working. The Larry David embodies a particularity of vision and a shamelessness in bucking conventional wisdom. Neither of these sides is on its own sufficient (an excess of golden retriever engenders people-pleasing and lack of critical thought; an excess of Larry David engenders cynicism and unproductive conflict). However, there is a reason the recipe calls for two dogs to one David: Operations work is fundamentally optimistic—stemming from the belief that if we put forth sincere, persistent effort, we really can find a better way of doing things.
Operations solutions tend to be iterative and piecemeal. They are not silver bullets but, rather, sequences in which every link in the chain must be regularly inspected. “Success” in operations is often simply the replacement of one big problem with a smaller, more tolerable one.
There is a distinction to be made between operations and administration: Operations often requires developing new systems and processes, whereas administration is implementing existing ones.2 (Of course, this line can be blurry in practice.) While attention to detail and some tactical ability are key to both operations and administration, operations requires considerably more creativity and big picture thinking; if the idealized shape of administration is a linear sequence of tasks, the idealized shape of operations is zooming in and out—constantly judging the individual steps in a process against the rubric of its goal.
People who are good at operations sometimes fail to understand why others find it difficult. This, I think, is because a) operations work is less visible than other kinds of work, and b) because the operations skillset is necessarily a generalist one. The decreased visibility of the work is a natural outgrowth of its emphasis on how (processes) over what (product), which makes successes—even one’s own successes—difficult to explain. Within the suite of generalist skills, these are the ones I believe to be most important: time/task management; clear communication; basic quantitative fluency (especially comfort with spreadsheets and thinking in tradeoffs/probabilities); resourcefulness; persistence.
If you possess (or believe could develop) deeply held convictions about the optimal way to load a dishwasher, that is a good omen.
No matter what kind of work you do, it behooves you to manage your email inbox effectively. I recommend this system:
If you can reply to the email quickly, do so immediately—then delete/archive the message.
If the email implies further action, add a task to your to-do list (see below)—then delete/archive the message.
If the email is not relevant until later, or you’re simply not ready to respond, snooze it until the time you need it. Keep snoozing indefinitely if you have to, and feel no shame about this.
Under this system, no email should be sitting in your inbox for multiple days. (Exception: a skimbox exclusively for reading material.) The purpose is simply to restrict your email to items that require immediate attention.
No matter what kind of work you do, it behooves you to manage your to-do list effectively. There are lots of great tools available for this this (I use Asana3), and I recommend a similar strategy as described for email:
Quick tasks which can be done now should be knocked out immediately.
Tasks which must be done soon should be scheduled for the upcoming week or month.
Tasks whose relevance or timeline is uncertain should be put in a designated holding area, to be reviewed periodically and thereupon deleted or calendared.4 (Again, for tasks that are not actually urgent, there is no shame in pushing back due dates indefinitely.)
Under this system, no task should inadvertently slip through the cracks—although some may be strategically put off.
All good ops people are resourceful in finding solutions, but the nature of the resources can vary greatly between different individuals. Where some might excel at technical fixes and automating workflows, others may succeed by enlisting friends or colleagues to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. From an operations standpoint, both of these solutions are equally valid. Remember: The ultimate measure of excellence here is the effectiveness of a method, not its elegance or cleverness; the operations gods smile equally on all who pass their pearly gates—be it by special key, bribing the guard, or smashing the hinges with a battering ram.
I once heard some film interview or director’s cut (I can’t remember the movie) in which a stuntman was asked how he fell from so high up without experiencing any pain. “Are you kidding me?” said the stuntman. “That hurt like a mother.” A similar example comes from the magician David Blaine, whose astounding illusions of eating glass or sticking a needle through his arm have turned out to be…actually eating glass or sticking a needle through his arm [watch at your own risk]. The trick in all three of these cases—and the one that pertains to operations—is that there very often is no trick. In past jobs, for example, I’ve sometimes encountered the implicit belief that there’s a manual I’ve read on, say, how to streamline some process or fix a broken printer or use a certain piece of software. While it may sometimes be that I’m privy to specialized knowledge/intuitions, it’s just as often that I’m employing strategies others could easily have tried themselves: trial and error, asking for help, deductive reasoning, and looking answers up on Google. In these cases, the real secret is a willingness to do—and even relish—the work that is tedious, unglamorous, or guaranteed to take multiple tries. The real trick to operations is that there is no trick.
At time of writing, this is also my (aspirational) Substack bio.
I first heard this distinction made by Tanya Singh on the 80,000 Hours podcast.
Dustin Moskovitz, the founder of Asana, is also the primary funder of Open Philanthropy where I now work; I’ve used and loved Asana for years before I took my current job.
I actually have two such holding areas: a “Parking Lot,” which I review monthly, and a “Someday,” which I review annually/as desired.
I'm inspired to try using Asana. Would be interested to know more about your setup.