The Future of Generalist Work

You see, task management (what GTD teaches) is a meta-skill – a skill that enhances your ability to learn and apply other skills.

Meta-skills are not specific to any particular subject or field but are broadly applicable across various domains. For example, emotional intelligence, communication, critical thinking, self-regulation, and... See more

While frameworks can offer valuable perspectives and guide decision-making, rigid adherence to them can lead to tunnel vision and unhelpful outcomes. Successful decision-making often requires a blend of framework-guided analysis and intuitive judgment, where the needs of both the business and the customer are carefully considered.

Managers should always be prepared to give away their people, and when the time comes for a high performer to leave, Shen argues that managers will actually be better off for it.

Pulling from the ethos of Molly Graham’s blockbuster Review article “Give Away Your Legos,” Shen has architected her own framework for how managers can avoid being caught... See more

Generalists, with their diverse skills, adaptability, and ethical awareness, are at the vanguard of this new epoch. They aren’t just visionaries but also implementers, merging AI-generated efficiency with human creativity and ethical discernment.

Today, management is a skill that only a select few know because it is expensive to train managers: You need to give them a team of humans to practice on. But AI is cheap enough that tomorrow, everyone will have the chance to be a manager—and that will significantly increase the creative potential of every human being.

It will be on our society as a... See more

Generalists have the advantage of interdisciplinary knowledge, which fosters creativity and a firmer understanding of how the world works. They have a better overall perspective and can generally perform second-order thinking in a wider range of situations than the specialist can.

When you make changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, you’ll have to cross a moat of low status—a period where you are bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

It’s called a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side and because anyone who can cross it has a real advantage.... See more

The tools that are available to each of us are so powerful, so varied and so complex that even the free ones are ignored or misunderstood. We’re too busy doing work to get much done.

And so we end up with the convenient and sexy tools (like the smartphone you might be reading this on) and fail to do the few hours or days of training we might need to... See more