Michelle Hutchinson

This interview is part of the “A Peek behind the Curtain” interview series.

Michelle Hutchinson holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, where her thesis was on global priorities research. While completing that, she did the operational set-up of the Centre for Effective Altruism and then became Executive Director of Giving What We Can. She is currently the Assistant Director of One-on-One Programme at 80,000 Hours.

Michelle and I discuss management, how to get advice, and her experience starting organizations. 

Note: This interview is from early 2021 and some parts may no longer accurately represent the guest's views. The transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.

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Lynette: What has been your experience or thought process regarding needing permission to do things?

Michelle: I think this very much resonates with me. It has been the kind of person I've been from when I was young, and then was really important in my career in the sense that I tended not to find it easy to come up with ideas and just decide to execute on them. It meant that it was really useful for me to be surrounded by people who were ambitious and had ideas.

In particular, I'm very motivated by helping the people around me. As soon as there was someone doing some ambitious project and they were like, "We want to do this thing. Do you think you can do this part of it or something?" that immediately feels way more appealing to me than coming up with that idea and deciding to do it. Things like running Giving What We Can, I just definitely don't think I would have, on my own steam, decided that I was ready for. Whereas having someone be like, "Nope, I think you are ready for it, and you're going to do it, go get them" made all the difference to me.

Then I think there's some separate thing where I assumed that a lot of the world had more accumulated knowledge than it really did. When we were initially setting up CEA, it really felt like, “Well, I assume that there's a lot to note before you can set up a company. That it’s this complicated business that a bunch of people have studied hard to do, and that's the only way you can set up a company.” Whereas it turned out, in fact, you can just read Companies House website and then just go and do it.

I think part of this is coming from people who are interested in academic things and do quite a bit of study. That gives you a false perspective on the world because you do a master's in philosophy and then end up doing a PhD and it's all aiming towards academia. The idea is that you need to have done 10 years of education in order to do this thing.

The idea that there could be something like setting up a company that actually you can just do by reading the website and then filling in the form feels really surprising.

I see this quite a lot in the people I talk to as well, particularly the ones who have done PhDs. Someone will have done a PhD in chemistry or something and be interested in going into policy and feel like, "Oh, presumably, therefore, I need to do a bunch of training in policy or do some policy degrees or something" when actually there are a bunch of fellowships directly designed to get people who have PhDs in science directly into Congress or something, but that feels very counterintuitive when you are in this environment where you need to have done tons of education in order to do a job like a postdoc.

Lynette: Yes. I think there was an EA forum or LessWrong post that was talking about the role of kindly old wizards, as opposed to mentors or something. They're the people who are just like, "Yes, you can do this" and know the individual enough to endorse them. That stamp of approval is actually a really powerful motivating force. It sounds like that was big for you. Do you think there's a way to more effectively use this in a community? I think it is bottlenecked by you actually need to know the person well enough to genuinely endorse them for being able to do the thing.

Michelle: Yes, I think there's some of that. I think some of that can come somewhat quickly. I think part of what advising does often is, look at someone's CV, talk to them for half an hour and be like, "Yeah no, I just think you can do this, maybe won't go well, but I'm pretty sure you can do it. You certainly can try. No one will think you're ridiculous for trying," that kind of thing.

I think it doesn't require many months of getting to know someone super well, you can just be like, "You're the kind of profile for whom this is reasonable." I also think that for some of these things, you can get this just by writing down the kind of thing that's needed in a place that people will find it or something. You can do a pull instead of push thing. You might think of Charity Entrepreneurship as doing something like this, where setting up a charity feels like this big intimidating thing that someone coming straight out of university would have no idea how to do.

Charity Entrepreneurship is saying, "Hey, you too can do this. Here are some things that you need, you need to be a smart person and have a good idea and stuff like that. Hey, we're going to vet people and figure out if you seem like actually a good fit for this. Also, we're going to describe some projects that you could do that are worth trying. Also, we're going to model it. Look, here are a couple of charities that have gone really well. You too can do this."

I think that kind of thing is also pretty useful because as an undergrad, I just hadn't really come across anyone who was setting up companies or charities or anything. I had no idea that you would be able to do this without too much work. The kind of thing that made it feel way more viable was talking to some people who had done it and were just like, "Yes, no, this isn't that hard. Here are the kinds of things you do. Also, here are some other people you can ask for help from," that kind of thing.

I think putting more information out there, I guess including the kind of thing that you're doing with your interview series, can help people realize that these are the kinds of things that they could have a go at as well.

Lynette: Nice. Is there anything in that genre that you would do, like “Okay, if you're thinking of setting up a baby org, here’s things that if you can do these, it's a good sign you can go ahead with it?” 

Michelle: I think it would depend, a bunch, on the org. One thing would be, if you're the one initiating it, I think being comfortable working on your own is pretty important. 

Having runway is pretty important. When we set up CEA, I at least wasn't really expecting it to go anywhere because you know the stats, like 9 in 10 startups or something fail, and 9 in 10 startups aren't run by a bunch of philosophy students. So, it really seemed like we had no hope, and we didn't bring much money at the start. I think I would have been very uncomfortable doing that if I wasn't in a fairly secure position of having parents that could support me and a partner who could support me if things didn't go well. 

Then I think I would run your plan past a few people to see how sensible they think it is, which I think would have the benefit of writing it down, spelling out what your theory is, and also getting other people's input. I think I probably can't say much more than that. It’s too abstract.

Lynette: Your "How to Get Advice" post would probably be good for that step.

Michelle: Yes, and then I guess a big thing is just asking people a lot. I was really pleasantly surprised by how happy people were to offer advice when we were setting up both CEA and GPI. There were just a lot of people, either from EA or in the wider world. People just really like helping each other and feeling like they have useful knowledge, plus there's quite a lot of esoteric knowledge you pick up, like “How does Companies House interact with the Charity's Commission?” stuff. It's nice to feel that you didn't learn that for nothing. 

You can then pass it on to other people. I found that people were just very happy to help if I wrote to them and was like, "Hey, here's why I'm asking you. Can I have half an hour of your time? I've got very specific questions for this thing that I'm sending up."

Lynette: Did you have any particular ways that you found helped you find the right people to ask those questions to? You're kind of fumbling around, "There's some esoteric knowledge out here but you may not know exactly who has it or exactly what you're looking for?” 

Michelle: I think I was pretty lucky. When we were setting up CEA as an actual organization, we'd already been going for two years maybe as a volunteer-run organization. We already had things like connection with Student Hubs, which is a charity organization that makes it easier for students to collaborate. I was able to reach out to the person who founded that and ask him.

I also thought a bit about “What other the random networks I had?” I'd done a bit of teaching for a charity that aimed to-- I forget now, exactly what it did, but it involves teaching summer schools for kids hoping to come to Oxbridge, I think, and I'd done some teaching for them. Again, I just wrote to the person who founded Oxford's and was like, "Hey, you set up an organization, would you be happy to chat to me about how you did that?"

By the time I was setting up GPI, I felt a bit more comfortable reaching out to recommendations. One example was that we were basically just philosophers initially involved in GPI, but we wanted to make it a joint philosophy and economics organization. My method of getting to talk to economists was often somewhat circuitous. 

One example was that I had this friend from EA, who had, many years ago, done a project with someone who was employed at the Economics Department at Oxford. He'd put me in touch with her so that she could advise Giving What We Can, and I just found her very helpful to talk to in general. I talked to her and then she was like, "Yes, this seems sensible and reasonable but not really my area." She put me in touch with someone who did a lot of the PBE organization for Oxford, so more interdisciplinary. That was already three links in and then I told him about our plans and he was like, "Oh, you got Peter Singer on board, I know who he is, this seems like a legit type of thing. Sure."

Then he was happy to put his name to a grant that we wrote for GPI, which was a relatively small grant. It basically paid my salary, but it was enough to be like, "We're a legit thing with an academic grant," or whatever. It's an interdisciplinary grant. That kind of bootstrapping things of talk to a bunch of people, see if they know anyone who might be useful. Talk to that person, make sure that you're using their time really carefully and asking sensible questions, and have some clear markers of "I thought through this project, it's a sensible thing," that kind of thing. 

Impressing them then allows them to be like, "Okay, who might I know that I can put you in touch with?" and therefore go closer and closer to the people you actually want to talk to from random EA friends to a tenured professor in economics.

Lynette: This is actually quite a difficult chain to follow. When people are trying to get through to who they know, going through one person and finding what they know and then getting referred on and finding who you eventually want to talk to is actually a fairly difficult process. Would you ask them if there was anyone else they know? Was there anything you were doing to facilitate making this more likely? 

Michelle: I think probably I guess the overall thing that you are trying to do is make it the case that the person in front of you would quite like to help you. I think the types of things to do there is like because I think, again, humans like helping each other. You're trying to make it the case that they are happy to help you and that they don't feel like you'll reflect badly on them if they put you in touch with someone else.

I think the things that were important there were paying attention to the details of things like making sure that you meet the person at the place that's most convenient for them at a time that's convenient for them, be on time, make sure that you keep the meeting to whatever time you had specified or they had specified, have concrete questions for them to make sure that you are already valuing their time.

This is the kind of thing that I feel makes a big difference to me is I feel like I get some people asking for my advice and they'll be super flexible when, and they'll be very careful to keep the meeting to half an hour or something, they'll have prepared the questions in advance, and those kinds of touches, and then they'll be like, "Nice to talk to you." That makes a real difference if I'm introducing them to someone else because I just find it a hassle if I'm in a chain with someone where I'm like, "I want to help you, but it keeps taking you ages to reply to me, and you keep trying to put the thing at a time that I don't want, and you want an hour and a half, even though I specifically said I was happy to chat behind half an hour." Those kinds of things just make me feel like, "This is annoying. I don't want to inflict it on anyone else." I think paying attention to those kinds of details can be fairly important. 

Then markers of like, "I'm fairly serious about the thing that I'm doing, and it's pretty sensible" I think probably make a big difference. Some of that is like not asking the basic questions but doing your homework so that the stuff you're getting from them is actually the stuff that's really useful. 

I think the example of having Singer and Parfit on board with GPI was really powerful. Obviously, you're often not going to be able to come up with such quick signs of "This is a serious thing" but having similar types of things or asking yourself the question, "Why should this person take this project seriously?" and then making sure that you communicate that to them seems pretty important.

Lynette: Okay. Sounds good. What else have you learned process-wise about setting up organizations and running small organizations? Like time management, dealing with people, what to do when you're stuck, or how to scope out a very ambiguous plan?

Michelle: I think it makes a big difference to me to work with at least one other person. I think this is pretty common in start-up land as well to say that you should have a co-founder if possible. When I started setting up GPI, Hilary was on maternity leave for about three months or something. Around a few weeks in, Jon Courtney joined me on the team, and I found that made a really big difference to me that suddenly there was two of us working on this problem rather than me doing it on my own.

I think that was one thing. I think because things are pretty underspecified, it feels fairly easy to really go down rabbit holes because you don't really have a framework for figuring out whether this is a rabbit hole or actually is the most sensible type of thing to do. It feels extra important to try to do more zooming out and thinking like, "Is this still the main thing that I should be working on?"

Michelle: I think probably looking into things of the right size and type was probably somewhat important. I think basically, there's just maybe more difference between tiny companies and big corporate companies than I initially realized from a distance. Things like the accounting regulations for sole traders versus big corporations are really different, and that can, I think, trip you up at both ends where if you just ask a random person who knows about how to do accounting or something at a big company, they wouldn't necessarily tell you the right thing because you are in a different situation.

Then also maybe the other end with the Giving What We Can Trust, which was the predecessor to EA Funds where we set it up thinking that we would get something like £10,000 a year of donations. The accounting processes we put in place were for approximately that amount, and we ended up in about our first year getting a million pounds, and that meant that our accounting processes just weren't at all adequate because when we'd looked into it, we'd looked into it for £10,000 a year. Then the order of requirements for it suddenly became way more stringent than we had been expecting.

Lynette: You mentioned zooming out to look at the bigger picture and check you're doing the right thing. Can you give an example of what that looked like for you or how you went about doing this to make sure that you were looking at the right levels of abstraction and connecting those to what you were doing?

Michelle: I think an example where I didn't do this at all well was when we were building a forum for Giving What We Can. We were trying to build a forum that was exactly of the kind that we wanted, and it ended up really blowing out as a project. I hadn't managed a tech project before. We were still mostly volunteers, and it ended up taking many months and just totally wasn't worth it. It didn't end up being used very much at all. I think that's a case where I hadn't properly zoomed out and been like, "Okay, how important actually is this, and at what point should we pivot away from working on this, even if we put quite a bit of time into it?" 

I think a place where I did probably be better on this, although it's quite different, is getting the permission in place for GPI to exist as an organization where we needed to go through quite a lot of committees for that, and they all had different people on them, and they met at different times, sometimes not in very clear sequence orders.

That required quite a lot of continuously figuring out like, "Who's on this committee? What kind of thing do they care about? Who should we talk to on this committee to try and make sure that we have someone who properly understands the proposal before it actually gets discussed at the meeting? What would we do if it didn't?" Because sometimes it would bounce back from a committee or something like, "What would we do if it doesn't get through this committee? Because the next meetings quite soon after, which are the most important ones for it to get through in order to get through to the next? In what cases are the two meetings with this committee before it goes through to the next committee and so it doesn't matter if it bounces back?" That kind of thing was a complex process that I think we did a good job of staying on top of and just making sure that we went through as many layers as possible as fast as possible while keeping people generally happy.

Lynette: Sounds good. With the forum, knowing what you do now about zooming out, what would you have done differently early on? Concretely, what would that have looked like?

Michelle: I think it probably would have looked like doing more of a minimum viable product. I think we considered this at the time and our worry was that a forum only works if you get enough people on it. If you do something that's fine but not great, then you get a few people, and you just don't get enough. It's bound to fail. 

I think, for example, the Giving What We Can Community Facebook group, which I think is what we ended up going with, has actually done pretty well and got fairly good engagement on it. I think I might have just ended up sticking with that. 

I might have tried something like a Google Group with some different threads and then sent that around and been like, "Do people want something like this?" I guess something that was quick to build and could immediately see whether people were using it. I might have used a bit more surveying different members on specific ways they would use things because I think I was more relying on a couple of people with specific views on this, whereas I think, in fact, you need quite a people to be interested in using something like this.

Maybe we would've surveyed members more on this and seen, "Are there just a couple of people who are really keen on this? Could we do something just for them? Are there quite a lot of people? What kind of things do they want?"

Lynette: There are a bunch of quick tests that you could have run that would've helped you. Okay. You've probably been thrown a lot into managing people, running organizations. What have you learned along the way about managing people? What surprised you?

Michelle: The biggest thing was, I just really love managing people, it turns out that is my wheelhouse.

Lynette: That is not what I usually hear.

Michelle: No? Interesting. What do you usually hear?

Lynette: When I hear people talk about managing people, it's very much like, "Ugh, I have to be promoted and do this."

Michelle: No, I love it. I learned that I loved it pretty early on. I was head of operations for CEA, which is why I was doing the setup of it, and it became a running joke about the size of the operations team because none of us knew what operations meant. Whenever there was something that it seemed good to do but no one else was doing, I would just subsume it into operations.

The web team was part of operations, and the finance team was part of operations, and training was part of operations, and working out how to improve diversity in the organization was operations. I basically just collected a ton of volunteers to work on all the different projects. For starters, I don't understand how people cannot like management because all this work gets done, and you get to take credit for it, and you didn't do it. It's ideal.

I think the thing I really like about it is that it's just so directly helping people. It's just entirely your job to support someone in doing their job better and to help them skill up as a person, help them unblock whatever problems they're having on their project and watch their project flourish. 

Then I think the other thing that makes a big difference is just, I've been incredibly lucky in who I've managed. All the way along the way, everyone's just really cared about the work they were doing, really cared about their colleagues. They were really joyous to work with. 

I think a lot of different things can be gotten over as long as you can maintain a feeling of, "We are a team together figuring out how this project can go well, and we each care about each other, and we're going to invest in spending time figuring out how this project can go well."

Lynette: Was there anything that helped you do this, mindsets or how you approached it, that enabled you to build that openness and feeling of being on the same team?

Michelle: I think one thing that definitely helps is I just tend to really like and care about people. Also, I'm a relatively transparent person. I think people really trust that's how I feel about them. I think that makes it a bit easier for them to acknowledge things that they're finding difficult and ask for help with them rather than try to pretend that everything is fine when it's not.

I'm also fairly happy typically to be open about stuff I find hard, which I think probably helps with this because it makes people feel a bit more like we're all on this journey together and we all find it hard. We just need to figure out how to support each other to do better rather than having the impression that "Oh, I am perfect. Why aren't you also doing these things?"

Lynette: How do you think this preference for getting along well and managing people and finding that easy in a sense has influenced your career direction choices if it has?

Michelle: I actually don't know how much it has. It clearly has, to some degree. I think probably the biggest way it impacted it was that when I was head of operations for CEA, it probably made me seem like a more natural candidate for running Giving What We Can because I'd so clearly as head of operations collected a whole bunch of volunteers and wanted to manage people, doing things and stuff.

It made me a natural fit for being head of Giving What We Can. I think the next transition I made to GPI, I just didn't manage many people at all. I managed Jon for a while, and I would have gone on to manage a team there, but I don't think my liking management made that much difference. Then when I moved to 80K, they were based in the Bay, and I was based in the UK and as was my husband. We loosely assumed that I would be remote from the team and therefore that I would never have a management position.

I took the position on the understanding that it was quite likely I’d never manage anyone at 80K. I think there if anything, it was kind of counter, with the exception of I think I had had the self-identity as someone who was not very "people-ly," which meant I both felt that I was someone who found it tiring to spend too much time with people and also someone who didn't have very good people skills. Liking management did highlight this other side of things, which was that the thing I most like in a job is supporting someone and helping them debug that kind of one-on-one interaction. Learning that about myself probably influenced my thinking that maybe advising 80K would be the kind of thing I would like doing.

Lynette: Makes sense. For you, do you think that really loving what you do is correlated with or necessary for doing it really well and excelling at it?

Michelle: It's probably correlated but not necessary. There have been a bunch of things I've done in various of my jobs that I've done well despite not loving them. I found quite a lot of the stuff I did at GPI pretty stressful and not that rewarding because a lot of it was working against other people. The kinds of things that GPI is trying to do are not the typical types of things that an academic faculty does. That increases the risks and complexity in things for the faculty. 

To compound that, we were trying to do it as fast as possible and to as high a spec as possible. There was a lot of trying to persuade people that we should be able to do this even though it would make their life harder. I really didn't enjoy that sense that I was nagging people and stuff. That meant that I did some parts of it worse than I would have otherwise.

I found it a bit hard to be always the right amount of friendly, patient, and diplomatic, particularly when the stakes felt higher to me or something. It just at times was very visceral to me that a couple of thousand pounds, to me, meant potentially a life saved from malaria, and a couple of thousand pounds to Oxford University is a drop in the ocean. That meant that I became more frustrated and grumpy than would have been good for the job.

Overall, I did pretty well at it. Probably one of the biggest effects this had was just that I couldn't work as hard. I did significantly less work at GPI than at 80K, entirely endorsed by my team as well. Hilary is, in general, big on work-life separation and, in particular, was keen on me making sure that I took evenings and weekends properly off and didn't get too anxious. That feels very different from my feeling at 80K where I'm just like, "Well, there's nothing I'd rather be doing. Why would I take more time off?"

Lynette: How do you decide what types of rest you need for long-term sustainability than, if you're enjoying it at the moment?

Michelle: Part of is to do with building the kind of life that I want. It feels particularly important to me that I'm building things and my life is going right. By comparison to, say, my husband. My husband spends a lot of time playing computer games and loves it and is just like, "Well, that was time excellently spent, I had a great time," whereas I find computer games very compelling in the moment but often afterward feel like I totally wasted the time. 

Whereas a thing that's really important to me is building close friendships. I, therefore, find it not great at the moment but also feel much better afterwards if the thing I did was spend time with a close friend, right now chatting on Zoom, rather than something like playing computer games. It feels like the life narrative there is somehow important or something. It also matters a bunch, for example, whether I feel like this is someone that I'm going to continue being close to for years to come, as opposed to a nice one-off conversation where maybe I really enjoy the one-off compensation but it feels less important to me. That might be less to do with the overall life narrative and more to do with things like feeling like I have a community and have a support system and things. 

Anyway, that seems to be very important to my well-being, having people that I talk to on a really regular basis, that I really trust in my corner. That's particularly easy for me because I work with a whole bunch of those people. I get to talk to them all the time anyway. I also have a few other regular Skypes, either weekly or fortnightly with people that builds up this feeling of having a bunch of people that I can rely on, in addition to being things that I would enjoy at the time.

Lynette: Okay. How do you get the most value out of interviews, spending this time with someone and you want to really get the most value and context out of them about whatever they're experts at? I know that 80K, for example, will often interview experts about things that they're researching or writing about places like Open Phil there, that's when they're trying to do research, getting an inside view of the field quickly from someone who knows a lot. If this doesn't feel like something you do much, feel free to pass.

Michelle: I don't do it explicitly is part of my job. A thing I do is try to learn a bunch more by talking to people who know about different career paths. The overall framing of the interviews is way more informal than the ones that are typical like Open Phil or informational interviews.

I find them very useful because I tend to remember stuff better if I talk to someone about it. I find it way more compelling to talk to someone than to read things. People can really point you to the things that you should be paying attention to, which is really useful. It's not only the case that you can come to them with specific questions that are useful for your work, but also that they can notice other things that they know about that are useful for your work until you can really find the most useful things. I find the EA community great for this just very disproportionately if you write to a person like, "Hey, 'I have some questions about your specific job,'' they're happy to chat. 

Then I prepare beforehand to make sure that I have specific questions. For example, during advising sessions, I'll try to write down afterward whatever came up that I didn't know the answer to and that way, when I'm talking to someone if I notice like, "Hey, I feel like I have a few finance questions," I can reach out to someone in finance and be like, "Hey, do you want to chat?" and then go through my questions and be like, "What things have come up in finance?" that I want to know so that I don't have to just remember all the things that I want to ask them. That's probably the biggest thing.

Lynette: Sure. Makes sense. Anything in particular in how you choose people for these calls?

Michelle: I'm kind of shy so disproportionately, they're people that I already knew because they're less scary. I've found it particularly useful talking to people who are really paying attention to where the value in things come from, particularly in complex systems. There seems like not the typical way people in general engage with large complex systems because they're supposed to be paying attention to their area and doing really well at their job. Then if that goes well, then they go onto the next level and stuff like that.

I find it very useful talking to the kinds of people who are just naturally interested in learning how the whole system works and then how they want to engage with it, which I guess also includes being pretty independent-minded. I try in so far as possible to find people who genuinely find it enjoyable to talk to other people. I think there are some people who-- maybe their main job is coding but they're also gregarious, and so they just genuinely would like to spend that evening talking to someone and telling them about their field and stuff.

As opposed to the people who either their job is coding because they would rather not be talking to too many people, please. Or their job is like running local groups or something and so they're spending all of every day talking to people and would like to have downtime in the evening. This is sometimes a bit hard to pick up, but I try at least to notice on a call, "Does this person seem like someone who's actually just really pleased to be doing things like this?" Okay, in that case, I'm going to reach out to them again, versus "Is this someone who's happy to help because they feel like they ought to but probably not someone I should talk to again?"

Lynette: Sounds good. Have you ever had doubts about whether you were good enough or qualified to be doing any of the roles that you've had? How do you deal with that?

Michelle: Yes, all the time.

Lynette: What is the story there?

Michelle: So many stories. What are some ways in which I deal with this? I think I've broadly been pretty lucky in that although I've done fairly setting-things-up projects, there's usually been other people involved also at foundery levels, who are spurring things along and also clearly showing trust in me, and happy to reassure me that yes, this still seems like a sensible thing to do. I think I'd have found it much harder if I was working on a project on my own to maintain belief that this was the right thing to do.

Lynette: I think it is often easier to connect with this kind of idea in a story form, just, do you have a story you feel comfortable sharing? 

Michelle: One example is I find doing strategy type work particularly hard to convince myself I can do. Thinking through something like, "What should Giving What We Can be doing in five years' time" really triggered a sense of "Surely this is above my pay grade and I'm not going to be able to do this," so I had to really consciously figure out how to get myself to do it anyway.

One way that a friend recommended to me was to approach it in a lighter-hearted fashion. She recommended getting into the frame of mind that was something like, "I'm not planning for Giving What We Can's future right now, I'm pretending to plan for Giving What We Can's future." What kind of things would I write down if I was pretending to plan for what Giving What We Can might do in five years' time? I found that kind of thing surprisingly helpful.

I also found it pretty useful to have lowish expectations and care about the input time. One thing that I did was for a prolonged period, I had to make Tuesday mornings the morning when I always worked on strategy, I would go to a particular café and where I didn't yet know how to work out their Wi-Fi so I didn't have any Wi-Fi, and bribe myself with a tasty coffee. The thing I had to do basically was just sit there for two hours and spend some time writing some things. Had a bunch of prompt questions, talked to people about what kinds of prompts might be useful.

I didn't have to come out of any one session with a specific plan or something, I just had to write down some thoughts on like, "If we were being super ambitious, what might we do?" "What kinds of things could most go wrong over the next 10 years?" Different prompts like that to try and get more concrete on what my thoughts were for different potential futures. Then once I had a tone of those kinds of things on paper, it suddenly made it much easier to try and put all things together into a plan.

Then another thing that was a bit similar that I did was set up a regular call with someone that I really respected, a friend who also runs an organization. The purpose of those was to discuss the plans and how they were going and that kind of thing. That A, meant that I had some incentive to actually do some thinking and write it down in a form that I could share with her, because otherwise, she couldn't give thoughts on it. B, meant that I had a bunch of concerted time when I was engaging with these kinds of things.

I found that very useful particularly because I think I just find it much easier to engage with these things in person, in conversation than I do when I'm on my own. Plus it had the added benefit that we are in similar types of positions and we have somewhat similar types of dispositions, so we had similar kinds of uncertainties and considerations to think through.

Lynette: Nice. What is your process for deciding your high-level goals?

Michelle: I try to do a yearly review. I didn't do one last year because Leo was a month old, but I did one this year. This year, I did the 80K career process plan rather than the usual overall personal development one. I think it's a bit hard to describe definitely what the process there is because they're each fairly long documents with a whole bunch of different questions. The general gist is have a whole bunch of prompt questions, some of which are asking questions like what do you really enjoy now that maybe you want to do more of? What do you not like that you want to reduce?

Also working from the other end of like, "What would you like to have done if you were looking back in 10 years' time?" That kind of thing. Then also looking at different areas of life like, "How is this area of life going? What might I want to change?" I guess another thing I find useful about the yearly review is I feel like there's a surprising number of things where you just put up with friction in the system without fixing it. By thinking through lots of different areas and being like, "Is there a way I can improve this area?" You can come up with stuff.

For example, for me, this year I often have Zoom calls because COVID, would like to have them in the sitting room where Leo can easily play, but my internet was pretty bad. On any one day, I basically can still have a video call. It's not optimal, but it's fine and so I was just putting up with it. Then over my annual review period, I was like, "Wait, are there concerted things that I can do about this?" Turned out yes, one was just change phone plans so that I have as many minutes as I like and I can just dial into things.

If my Internet's bad, another was getting an external Wi-Fi antenna that I plug into my computer. I feel like often when I'm doing a specific review, I'll find stuff like that where I've just been putting up with a thing that's making my life a bunch worse on a daily basis that I can just actually fix.

Lynette: When you're setting your goals, what role does explicit prioritization play versus that level surety intuition-driven prioritization?

Michelle: I think I tend to naturally prefer explicit reasoning. I probably err on that side a bit more and in particular, I like to have some sense of why I'm doing things. I think there are also definitely things that I do that are more intuition-driven. I think the kind of thing would be like-- so this year, my highest level learning goal is developing a stronger sense of having specific opinions on complex hard things and figuring out how to develop specific opinions on those and have fewer things where I'm just like, "Ah, I don't know, it seems complicated and hard, I have no view on that."

I think that overall goal, I have a pretty concrete explicable case for like, "This seems pretty important" and also, I use it a bunch at my job and it seems useful in various ways. Then one of the ways in which I plan to work on that is write down some of my views. I've been writing them down quite a bit in the form of blog posts so far for the EA forum and I think I have much less of an explicit sense of why that's an appealing way of doing them.

For example, why the EA forum as opposed to writing more for the 80K blog or whatever? Is it really worth writing them up in a way that's publicly shareable rather than writing them in Google Docs myself? Because I think a large part of what I'm actually trying to do is tease out what my view is and figure out whether I can tie it together into a specific conclusion and that's the thing I really care about and arguably, I can do a bunch of that in a Google Doc.

Even in terms of feedback, I can probably do a roughish Google Doc and then get feedback from one of my friends or something. I feel this pull towards posting on the EA forum, I'm not really sure whether that's mostly to do with the fact that I separately want to get better at public writing or whether it's to do with feeling some public good obligation of like, "This is the kind of thing that good effective altruists do" or if it's some kind of like, "I like to feel part of a community and it's nice to feel we're contributing together on this thing."

Anyway, that feels like a subpart of the goal that's much more intuitively driven and now I just feel like I'm going along with it and being like, "Well, it seems like I feel a pull to that" and it makes it easier to do this higher-level thing if I'm writing a post for the forum because I like the idea of doing that. I'm just going to do that.

Lynette: How do you deal with uncertainty or feeling like there's too many things and you're pulled between a lot of options?

Michelle: I think working for 80k helps here because I think I naturally feel very unsure about how much I should be doing lots of things. Because maybe then you can get the lower-hanging fruit on lots of different things versus being focused on one thing. I think 80K just has a strong institutional norm of “Make sure you focus” and I think that's my preferred way of working anyway. I like having multiple things on, but I like having a sense of what the main thing is.

Then also, I think I tend towards a like "Oh, but maybe I have this obligation” mindset and it's quite useful to have a sense of like, "No, I have one focus, I have a job. I'm not obliged to all the other things also." I guess I partly try to make sure that I have a sense of how I bucket my time somewhat explicitly. I think it makes it a bit easier that I have a kid, so I look after Leo in the evenings and weekends and so if I'm wanting to do a thing that's like a Q&A, or chatting to someone informally to give them advice or something, I can fairly explicitly bucket, "Is this main work time or is it a thing that I'm going to do while looking after Leo?"

For it to be the latter, it has to be fairly informal and also I'm only going to be willing to do it if it genuinely sounds fun and stuff like that. For the former, it needs to be competitive with the normal work that I would be doing and also not distract from focus too much, which means a few different things of like, "How similar is it to my main job? Is it likely to have synergies, and how much time have I already spent on my core priorities this week? Is it too much or too little?” Basically.

Lynette: Why does 80K have this norm that's really pushing toward having one main focus at a time?

Michelle: I think it basically seems to be mainstream advice, particularly in the startup space. I think it's in particular in the space of businesses that are aiming to grow really fast and really successfully. Y Combinator pretty heavily pushes that you should care about focus. You should have one metric that you are aiming towards. You should all have a plan that you are executing on. That kind of thing. I think it's basically that, that 80K is modeling itself on a startup because it's trying to do something very ambitious and would like to be scaling its impact pretty fast. To do that well, it seems like focus is important.

Lynette: Sounds good. Cool. How do you engage with explicitly setting goals on months or bout timescales? And objective metrics, how do you interact with those?

Michelle: I'm a big fan of planning so I quite like having an overall sense of what we are focusing on in a bout, also some idea of what kind of thing I'm likely to have as my main thing per week. Then at the beginning of the week, I do a pretty granular plan of "Here's what I'm likely to do each day." That's pretty common for employees at 80K, although not all of us do that.

I find that pretty useful and in particular, the weekly review and plan, I find pretty useful for going over like, "What did I do last week? How did it go by comparison to my expectations? What are all the things that I have to fit in this week? Are there any things that I need to push to next week? What went well last week that I should learn from and capitalize on? What went badly and how can I make sure those things don't recur?" Then talking all of that through with my manager all seems pretty useful.

Lynette: That's cool. What are the foundations of your productivity? The key things that enable you to get stuff done?

Michelle: I think probably writing things down is really big for me. I used to use Asana, which I really like, but I've moved over to using Habitica because it gives you cute pets if you do things, which I feel is a major advantage. It's less organized in some ways than Asana so I use both Habitica and Workflowy. I don't know how people used to do things before they had this kind of tech, because I just find it so useful to be able to, not just write down anything when it occurs to me as a thing that I need to do, but be able to quickly put it into the right list of like, "Oh, that's a thing that I need to do, but I don't need to do it until a few weeks from now,” or whatever. Also be able to have my phone on me all the time and put a thing immediately into the right list and that kind of thing. I find that pretty important. 

I think this weekly review and plan is a big deal for staying on top of stuff and making sure that I'm getting the highest priority things done plus I think it's a good framework for adding other things on. I include in that, things like having a life development goal each week.

Last week's one was meditate in the morning at least once because I had paused meditating a couple of months ago and think that actually that would be useful to take up again. The week before, it was do some dancing in the morning. Having that kind of framework means that I can add in these other habits. I just have a way of immediately getting myself to be more likely to do them because I write them down there and then Neil sees whether I did them or not. I think those are probably the main things that provide the scaffold.

Lynette: Sounds good. What are the most common failure modes to your productivity that you have to keep an eye out for?

Michelle: I tend to be a somewhat anxious person. It's pretty good to notice if I'm getting anxious. Then I can be inclined to be like, "Ah, things are terrible. I should continue trying to work to get through them." I think that's usually not the best thing. The best thing in fact is to notice I'm anxious, do something that involves outdoors and exercise, like go for a walk, and talk to someone about it. Then maybe just take a break to clear my head.

I think the best thing here is notice I'm anxious, call Brenton or one of my other colleagues, talk through the thing that gives a good outside view of like, "Is this actually a thing that you need to continue finishing off now, or should you actually do the clearing your head thing?" Typically, it's just quite reassuring or something because they're like, "Yes, that seems like a hard problem." Talk to them, go for a walk to feel a bit better about things, come back, maybe watch a comedy or something and then go back to it, and then usually I can go back to it with a much fresher look at things. That's one of the things.

Another is keeping tabs on whether I'm pushing myself too hard, I'm a bit prone to that. Like the other week, my au pair decided to take a week off with somewhat short notice, which is totally fine. I agreed with it, but I had already planned the work I would do the following week so I was like, "I'll just look after Leo and work basically full time. That'll be fine" and then got to the end of Monday and was also feeling ill. Then was feeling like, "Oh, I'll just push on through it" and needed to step back and be like, "No, this isn't sensible at all."

The sensible thing to do here is put off some of this work for next week and just accept that I shouldn't do it. It's always tempting to decide that I'll work both weekend days and things like that, and then end up starting Monday really tired instead of deciding that actually, I need time to just rest and not do anything too strenuous.

Lynette: Okay. What's a skill you've spent deliberate effort in developing that's paid off a lot?

Michelle: I find this a bit hard to answer because I feel like the real answer here is to do with management, but I find soft skills really hard to properly quantify or something, to really figure out how much I've improved, but I've spent a lot of time reading different books to do with leadership or coaching or feedback and thinking through how to apply them in different situations. Talking through with people who have more management experience than me, how to navigate some particularly difficult situations. I think that has paid off pretty well.

Recently, 80K merged our advising and our headhunting teams. I think managing teams and then having one person run both and the head of the other team had moved off doing either is just quite tricky to switch over who's managing the team. We were in this weird situation where I had been managing two of the team members and was still on the team but was no longer managing them. Someone else was managing them. We had to make it very clear that Neil was now managing the team rather than me managing it. It felt like that transition just went really smoothly.

I think that was in large part because we were really paying attention to how to make it go smoothly and to do handover meetings with Neil and Jenna and me where Jenna was giving Neil a bunch of information about how she liked to be managed and things. Then I was able to pitch in and be like, "I think maybe these things worked quite well" when we had those systems and stuff like that. I think Neil found that kind of context helpful. Then we went into doing team meetings quite quickly and it felt like we were paying quite a lot of attention to how to make those kinds of things go well.

I think that's probably paid off a bunch because it just seems there are so many different ways for people interactions in organizations to go wrong and just make people a bit less productive and things. I think in general, we do those things fairly smoothly, thankfully.

Lynette: Were there any particular management leadership books or resources that stood out to you as this was really useful?

Michelle: Maybe the first one that I read was Coaching for Performance, which is light on detail, but I really like the overall gist of. But there are a lot of coaching books, I don't know whether this is necessarily the best one. 

I quite like the manager tools book, The Effective Manager or something. It's a bit basic and I think also aimed at middle management in large organizations, but I think it does just go through sensible principles to consider.

I quite liked Quiet Leadership, although I read it a long time ago now. It was about, basically, getting people to ask questions rather than this idea that leadership is all about telling people what to do. I think that's particularly not the case when you work with really smart people. What you're actually trying to do is ask them questions and that kind of thing.

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