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Personal reasons why I wished I delayed donations: I started donating 10% of my income about 6 years back when I was making Software Engineer money. Then I delayed my donations when I moved into a direct work path, intending to make up the difference later in life. I don't have any regrets about 'donating right away' back then. But if I could do it all over again with the benefit of hindsight, I would have delayed most of my earlier donations too.
First, I've been surprised by 'necessary expenses'. Most of my health care needs have been in therapy and dental care, neither of which is covered much by insurance. On top of that, friend visits cost more over time as people scatter to different cities, meaning I'm paying a lot more for travel costs. And family obligations always manage to catch me off-caught.
Second, career transitions are expensive. I was counting on my programming skills and volunteer organizing to mean a lot more in public policy and research. But there are few substitutes for working inside your target field. And while everyone complains about Master's degrees, it's still heavily rewarded on the job market so I ultimately caved in and paid for one.
Finally, I'm getting a lot more from 'money right away' these days. Thanks to some mental health improvements, fancy things are less stressful and more enjoyable than before. The extra vacation, concert, or restaurant is now worth it, and so my optimal spending level has increased. That's not just for enjoyment. My productivity also improves after that extra splurging, whereas before there wasn't much difference in the relaxation benefit I got from a concert and a series of YouTube comedy skits.
If I had to find a lesson here, it's that I thought too much about my altruistic desires changing and not enough on everything else changing. I opted to 'donate right away' to protect against future me rebelling against effective charity, worrying about value drift and stories of lost motivation. In practice, my preference for giving 10% has been incredibly robust. My other preferences have been a lot more dynamic.
Decreasing focus over time may not mean decreasing productivity:
Suppose you want to double your productivity by doubling your work hours from 30 to 60 per week. Standard advice will say this is silly, since focus decreases over time. You may still increase your productivity but it will scale slower than your work hours.
But this assumes all assigned work is equally important. In reality, many jobs have peripheral tasks that must be done before your core tasks (or your "real work"). Civil servants have reporting requirements, academic researchers have teaching obligations, and individual contributors everywhere have to attend meetings so managers can coordinate direction.
Suppose the non-core tasks takes 20 hours per week. Then going from a 30-hour to 60-hour workweek isn't just doubling your core task hours; it's quadrupling your core task hours from 10 to 40! And that quadrupling of core task hours can outweigh the diminishing focus over time. It can even mean that the last 20 hours are more productive than the first 20 hours.
Now 20 hours of peripheral tasks is admittedly an extreme example. But it may not be that far off for modeling career advancement. Promotions are based partly on stretch assignments (or "performing above your level") and you won't get to work on stretch assignments all the time. Managers may split your time between your current job and the job you want to promote into.
Once you get to a certain level of seniority and organizational maturity, then more of your hours become core task hours. So diminishing focus more directly translates into diminishing productivity. But I think the earlier you are in your career, the more exploration you're doing, and the further you are from your target job, the more likely you'll want those extra hours.
At face value, what you've written makes sense. It depends massively on the structure of the job of course. But if you have a flat amount of non-core tasks and a much larger number of core tasks, then... yeah, you are right.
I think that one of the challenges is that many of the non-core tasks require a lot of context, so you can't just outsource them or hire an administrative assistant to handle them. They tend to be tightly tied to other tasks, or at least to your thinking and knowledge (such as a civil servant that has to write a report on what work she has accomplished this week). And I imagine there are some scenarios where it would be feasible to outsource the task but organizational rules and culture don't allow it (such as a academic researcher delegating all teaching responsibilities to someone else). And if I need to communicate information verbally to several people, could they all send their assistants to attend the meeting instead of coming themselves? I suppose they could, but that means that when we make a decision the assistant needs to be empowered with decision-making authority, and the assistant's judgement and context might be inferior to the manager's.
My reaction to this line of thinking is basically that there are lots of challenges and impracticalities and aspects of various situations that make it not very feasible. But for situations that don't have much of those barriers: yeah, you are right. 👍
Strong agree. By no means am I suggesting organizations outsource or cancel more of their non-core work. It’s hard for organizations to define those, non-core work needs a lot of context, and a lot of grunt work is genuinely “real work” that people don’t appreciate.
But from an individual POV, I wanted to make sense of the feeling that extra hours could sometimes be increasing in value even when I was very tired. And I think it’s this dynamic with some tasks or career goals where the last N% is where most of the rewards are. So spending more time once you get there is a big deal.
I believe Claudia Goldin calls these “greedy jobs”.