All right, moving on. We have a question from Pierre. Pierre asks, how do you manage your online presence when doing Phantom part-time jobs? He elaborates that he's a software engineer and he is concerned about his boss monitoring his work status using Microsoft Teams. So he goes on to elaborate, if you stop working early, how do you deal with tools like Teams that communicate your online status?

For example, my supervisor might start asking questions if I'm often listed as being absent or don't respond to messages. So while I like the idea of Phantom part-time jobs, I feel like Teams prevents me from effectively doing it. Any advice for this issue? All right, so just quick backgrounds, Phantom part-time jobs, of course, is my terminology for when you get really on your game about organizing your work, full capture, quarterly, weekly, daily planning, you're on top of things, you're going to free up a lot of time because most people are not on top of things.

So you're going to hit whatever the reasonable workload is for your position in less time than your peers. And now you have two options. You can take that extra time and invest that into your main job and therefore accelerate the acquisition of career capital and opening up more options or advancement in your career, or you can take that time and say, I'm going to invest it in other parts of my life.

So maybe I have another endeavor I'm working on, or maybe it's a non-professional interest. I'm now going to spend much more time on. I'm going to take advantage of this free time. Now my argument from an ethical perspective is that if you're in a non-entry level, knowledge work style job, where you're not being paid by the hour, you're being paid a salary to fulfill a particular role.

The strict number of hours you work does not really enter this equation. If I am hiring you to be the associate director of marketing for some startup or something like this, I am hiring you to do that role and the things that come along with that role and to execute them at a high level.

I'm not hiring you to punch seven hours or eight hours into a particular time clock. That is a crude proxy for productivity that I think we've moved beyond. So I think it's completely appropriate if you think you're executing at a high level. And my definition of a high level is you seem that you're doing better than your peers that are in the same company.

Oh, my act is more together. I'm being praised for what I'm producing. I'm getting things done. I'm getting things done when I say I'm going to get them done. We're hitting objectives. People seem to be happy with my work. If you're hitting those markers, then I don't care how many hours you're spending.

And this is taking five hours a day. You have just freed up more time to do something else. I think that is completely fine for non-entry level, non-hourly knowledge work. You have a problem here that there seems to be a hyperactive hive mind culture at your workplace. Where work is coordinated in ad hoc fashion with back and forth unscheduled messaging in your case on teams.

Yeah, that's a bigger problem. That's the whole issue. I tackle in my book a world without email. It's a terribly ineffective way of getting a bunch of human brains to coordinate and collaborate on producing value. So that's a bigger problem. Maybe buy him a copy of my book. But for you in the short term, what should you do about your phantom part-time job?

I would say spread it out. I think it's the simplest solution here. So instead of having the mindset of I can now get my work done in five hours instead of eight. Instead of having the mindset of then I will work till 2. And then stop working. Instead say, okay, I am now going to spread three hours of other types of things throughout my day.

That's much more maskable. That's much less notable, right? The other thing I would recommend here is even if your boss is a big believer in a hyperactive hive mind culture and you don't want to confront him about this and it's too difficult to change the whole team. You can still move your individual interaction with him and the rest of your teams or her and the rest of the teams.

You can move it away from the hyperactive hive mind. I talk about this in a world without email by just thinking about internally. What are the different things I'm involved with again and again in my job? Call these processes. Given just what I can control assuming I cannot control anyone else.

What changes can I make into how I execute these processes that will minimize the number of unscheduled messages that show up in teams or emails that have to be responded to? Just focusing on what you can control you can often make a drastic reduction in the amount of these unscheduled messages that arrive that require a response by just nudging people into better implementations without telling them you're doing that without calling them better implementations.

This is where you just sort of say casually. Yeah, you know if the bug review, I think what we should do here is use this bug review tracking software seems to be really great. You know anything you have put it in there. I will go through it on Monday and I will give you a call Monday at 1 or stop by your office.

I have any questions and and then I'll sort of know what we're up against. I don't know if that's what software developers actually do. I'm making up all these words, but you see what I'm doing here kind of specifying what you're going to do. In a way that minimizes back and forth messages without ever talking about bother me less.

I'm too distracted. Stop doing this. Send me less messages. All people care about is this thing will get taken care of its clear how it's going to happen. Great. That's one less thing. I have to worry about and they will move on. So here that's what I would say you should be doing is spreading out your phantom part-time job and then to slowly starting to nudge the way you work with your colleagues away from the hyperactive hive mind that's going to give you a lot more leeway.

Thank you.