Magnitude tuning™️

Tweaking the Size of Things…

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

I recently uncovered a productivity tactic.

I've never heard anyone talk about it.

It arose quite naturally for me over time. But I never had a term for it.

So, let me introduce you to magnitude tuning.

Magnitude tuning is all about tweaking the size of things.

It's answering questions like:

• How do you determine the appropriate length of a time box?

• How can you appropriately scope a task/project/program?

• How many actions should you put on a weekly review? 

But that’s only half of the story.

Magnitude tuning is also about assigning things to different orders of magnitude.

So it also provides answers to the following:

• Which action steps should you put in a monthly vs. quarterly review?

• Which tasks are standalone? Which goes in a project? Or program?

• Which cadence should you choose for personal goal setting (weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly)?

Magnitude tuning is necessary because of how we think.

Maybe you have noticed it in your life.

Our thinking capacity ranges from very detailed to very abstract, from very nuanced to very high-level, and from focused to diffuse. When it comes to a single thinking session, however, we are often “locked into” just one level along this spectrum. We rarely, if ever, traverse different levels of thinking.

I guess that’s because jumping between levels is mentally taxing.

Every time we do, we have to flip our understanding of things. We have to shift our perspective. We have to "reset the slate" - the priorities - in our minds; we need to figure out what to focus on and what to ignore.

So it is our mental capacities that force us to select a given thinking level first. Because then we are able to abstract away unnecessary detail and blind out distracting generalizations. Through a process of active inhibition, we can narrow down on key elements most relevant to the task at hand.

And most of the time, this works quite well.

But every once in a while, we tackle a problem on the wrong level.

And when we do, we colloquially either

• miss the forest for the trees (miss a bigger picture by thinking on a level too low for the problem at hand) or

• disregard the devil in the details (miss important details by thinking on a level too high for the problem at hand)

It is such a failure that magnitude tuning tries to address it.

Of course, we should not fool ourselves. We cannot magnitude-tune everything. There will always be times when we engage on the wrong thinking level.

But I want to highlight the fact that some things can actually be improved quite easily.

One especially fruitful area of application for this tactic is our productivity katas¹.

Why?

If we are off-magnitude in our productivity katas we will repeatedly and even intentionally engage in faulty reasoning.

That’s something to be avoided.

So the obvious question becomes: how do we tune our katas?

Since I am not aware of any content on this topic I had to do a little digging of my own.

So far, I've found inspiration in three places:

1. Literature and Reading Skills

2. Computer Science

3. Theory Building (Science in General)

Let's look at what these fields have to say about thinking levels.

1 | Literature and Reading Skills

In his classic How to Read a Book, Adler provides an illuminating example of what happens if we approach a challenging book at the wrong level of thinking.

If you insist on understanding everything on every page before you go on to the next, you will not get very far. In your effort to master the fine points, you will miss the big points that Smith makes so clearly about the factors of wages, rents, profits, and interest that enter into the cost of things, the role of the market in determining prices, the evils of monopoly, the reasons for free trade. You will miss the forest for the trees. You will not be reading well on any level.
— Mortimer Adler, How To Read a Book (1972)

I took two things from this.

First, I need to become aware that different reading modes exist.

Second, I need to deliberately choose the appropriate mode for each book and then stick with it.

Now let’s translate this into the world of productivity katas.

I take it that we should first become aware that there are even different thinking modes.

Then, we should design every kata for a single one of them.

Otherwise, we may underperform in all of them.

As many people fail by reading every book the same way, many fail at approaching their katas on the right level.

2 | Computer Science

In Computer Science, there is a lot of talk about abstraction.

Essentially, abstracting means removing details.

According to John V. Guttag, the "essence of abstraction is preserving information that is relevant in a given context and forgetting information that is irrelevant in that context."

This seems to be another suitable guide for magnitude tuning: we should try to remove or hide everything unnecessary for any given level.

I translate this here to mean visually as well as conceptually.

There should be no distracting (off-magnitude) things in our visual perception.

Nor should we maintain cross-cutting mental models that force us to jump between such levels of abstraction.

While it may sound obvious, it may very well be that you are violating this in many ways. Think all-encompassing personal dashboards.

3 | Theory Building

The last guidance I found in the literature of expertise. Here, a point was made about building theories. When you want to do so, you should always reason one level above the concept you are trying to explain.

"A theory of expertise has to be built at one level of abstraction higher than the models which represent actual expert competence. If you wanted to implement a theory of architecture, you would not write a problem that simulates a house. You would write a program that simulates an architect – in other words, one that designs houses. But if you want to implement a theory about expertise in architecture, then you do not want a program that simulates an architect. You want a program that, as it were, designs architects."
— Bereiter & Scardamalia, Surpassing Ourselves (1993)

This effectively translates into residing one level above what you are trying to manage or make decisions about.

So, for instance, if you want to plan a day, think in weeks. If you want to plan a week, think about it in months.² And so on…

---

So here we have it.

These are some first guiding principles for magnitude tuning:

• Raise your awareness of the different thinking levels involved

• Design productivity katas with a specific thinking level in mind

• Remove visual and conceptual off-level distractions from your katas

• Design katas one level above the thing they try to manage

Magnitude tuning can help us with resizing things and shifting them around.

It can help us ease our workflows, free up our mental resources, and allow us to focus on the important stuff.

We will dig deeper into the topic in the next part of this series where I’ll give you concrete and practical examples of how I apply them in my life.  

Until then, I wish you all the best! God speed!

PS: Please let me know if you know any other examples of “magnitude tuning” or how to approach it. I’d be happy to discuss your case.

1. I repurpose the term kata a little bit here. I use it to refer to anything we regularly do or practice: methods we use, routines we execute, SOPs we perform—basically, anything predefined, choreographed, or sequenced.

2. This example was simplified for rhethorical reasons. I will get more concrete and practical in the next part.