Selective Negligence

Do you ever feel like there's too much to be done?  How do you respond?  Do you word harder?  Do you diligently push things out and reschedule?  Do you intentionally drop things?  Do you get them done but at a lower quality?

In 1970 after extensive study, MIT Dean and Chief Psychologist Benson Snyder published a book entitled "The Hidden Curriculum".  In chapter 2 of this book, he relayed the finding that the students who did best at MIT were not necessarily the brightest or most gifted, but those who most effectively employed a technique he termed "selective negligence".   

My own experience at MIT nearly 25 years later was very much the same.  Many students coming in achieved great grades and high test marks by being perfectionists in high school.  Pushing themselves harder than their peers.  That's how I approached high school activities and it paid off in my college application. But trying to apply that approach to MIT studies is a recipe for disaster. 

I think the negative framing is important.  Selective negligence is about deciding to be negligent in some of what you know you're supposed to be doing. 

When I attended MIT, the school was aware of the step-function change in intensity and their student's natural desire to be perfectionists and tried to make this transition easier by making freshman classes "pass/no record".  There were no grades and you could fail the course with no consequence other than you would have to take it again.  But MIT slams you and sophomore year grades kick in.  As much as Dr Benson Snyder seemed be advocating for a more reasonable workload, the workload at MIT was simply too much for anyone to handle.  There's a reason they call it "drinking from the firehose". 

Worse for me, I wasn't the smartest student around... not by a long shot. 

But I figured out how to get very good at selective negligence.  I skipped or slept during lecture.  I failed to turn in problem sets when I knew I was already going to get an A in the course.  I turned in incomplete work so I could get sufficient sleep.  I carefully mixed in easier courses with harder courses each semester so that if I had to I could neglect some of that easier course for a while when the harder course was kicking by butt.  I found an excuse not to go to my monthly staff meetings for my job when I was studying for big exams.  Ultimately I graduated with a Bachelors and Masters in CS in the top 5% of my class.  More than anything I had mastered selective negligence. 

Framed more positively, selective negligence is all about prioritization and time management.  But I think the negative framing is important.  Selective negligence is about deciding to be negligent in some of what you know you're supposed to be doing. 

I hesitate to say this here as I'm sure colleagues and even my managers might read this, but being very good at selective negligence has continued to be what has helped me be successful both at startups and larger companies.

In startups, there is always no end of work that needs to be done.  You're constantly over-committed and the risk of failure is high.  The real challenge is not in prioritizing what you're going to do.  The challenge is deciding what you're going to fail at or what you're going to do the bare minimum to get by.

In larger corporations, the work load doesn't go away.  And what the organization, your peers, your managers want is often someone who both says "yes" and also "consistently delivers".  Walking that line is extremely hard.  Saying no allows you to focus on delivering your current commitments, but means you're maybe not the go-to person anymore when the next big opportunity comes along. 

I see this all the time where people are negligent on the wrong things.  If you're a people manager leading a team, hiring and developing your team is your ticket to scaling.  But so often when a team is in crunch mode, the manager rolls up their sleeves to dive in on the code or run the tests cases themselves or project manage the deliver and fails to pay attention to hiring and developing their team for a month or two.  Then personal circumstances come up and someone leaves the team and the death spiral continues.

The other side of the coin is that the "selective" part of selective negligence implies realizing which places negligence is entirely unacceptable and never failing on those. 

Similarly, I sometimes see senior-level engineers asked by a VP of another business area to provide tangential input into their project.  But instead of viewing this as an opportunity to really help educate another business area and leader how to think about their problem as well an opportunity to build personal rapport and credibility across teams and with senior leadership, they view this as a tax and do a low-quality job.  Opportunity missed. 

In many circumstances, you can get away with being selective about what you do and how well you do it.  You can look at a meeting and decide if your team has it covered without you and politely excuse yourself to spend an hour trying to turn up new candidates.  You can decide not to write a 2-page email reply to a controversial topic realizing if you wait an hour someone else will likely take care of that anyways.  You can politely decline that vendor conversation where you know there's a less than 5% change you'd ever want to use them and if you did you have their number.  You can skip the social networking mixer your VC set up this month to help the team prepare for their launch. 

The other side of the coin is that the "selective" part of selective negligence implies realizing which places negligence is entirely unacceptable and never failing on those.  If you're overseeing the deployment or update of a fleet of high-availability servies... that's not the time to select any level of negligence.  If you've committed to speaking in front of 200 people, that's not the time to be negligent in your preparation.  This is why the phrase is "selective negligence".  Being negligent on the wrong thing can you get failed out of school or fired from your job or worse very quickly. 

Everything I've described applies equally to your family life as well.  My 5 year old's soccer match is not something I'll be negligent about attending -- not a chance.  But maybe vacuuming the house will have to wait.

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About the Author: Brad Porter is a veteran of the Internet boom and has spent his career helping some of the most innovative and fastest growing companies of the past 20 years scale their organizations and technology platforms.  If you like this post, please share.