To avoid the “opposite advice” thing, maybe we can just talk about in absolute terms what are good amounts to ask for help?
My guess is that people should ask their friends/colleagues/acquaintances for help with things a few times a week, and ask senior people they don’t know for help with things a few times a year. This is based on a sense of “imagining everyone was doing this” and wondering where I want to turn the dial to. I’m interested if others have different takes about the ideal level.
I think if people are asking noticeably less than that they should be seriously asking themselves if they should be ramping it up. And if people are asking noticeably more they should be seriously asking themselves if they should be turning it down.
I think that people receiving requests should tend to look for signals that suggest that the person makes few/many requests, and be more inclined to be positive if they make few or more inclined to be negative if they make many—in order to try to get the overall incentive landscape right to encourage people to make about the right number of requests. Of course this is kind of hard to detect particularly if someone is cold emailing you … anyone have better ideas?
My guess is that people should ask their friends/colleagues/acquaintances for help with things a few times a week, and ask senior people they don’t know for help with things a few times a year. T
Is this a few times each person, or a few times total? It’s hard for me to tell because either seems slightly off to me.
I meant like maybe 3-15 times total (“few” was too ambiguous to be a good word choice).
Writing that out maybe I want to change it to 3-30 (the top end of which doesn’t feel quite like “a few”). And I can already feel how I should be giving more precise categories // how taking what I said literally will mean not doing enough asking in some important circumstances, even if I stand by my numbers in some important spiritual sense.
Anyway I’m super interested to get other people’s guesses about the right numbers here. (Perhaps with better categories.)
Sure that makes more sense to me. I was previously reading “few” as 2-4 times, and was thinking that’s way too few times to be asking for help from coworkers total in a week, but a bit too high to be asking (many) specific senior people for help each year.
I’m sure it’s context dependent and depends on size of favours. But I’m not sure it depends that much—and I’m worried that if we don’t discuss numbers it’s easy for people who are naturally disinclined to ask to think “oh I’m probably doing this enough already” (or people who are naturally inclined to do this a lot already to think “oh yeah I totally need to do that more”).
Maybe you could give a context where you think my numbers are badly off?
To avoid the “opposite advice” thing, maybe we can just talk about in absolute terms what are good amounts to ask for help?
My guess is that people should ask their friends/colleagues/acquaintances for help with things a few times a week, and ask senior people they don’t know for help with things a few times a year. This is based on a sense of “imagining everyone was doing this” and wondering where I want to turn the dial to. I’m interested if others have different takes about the ideal level.
I think if people are asking noticeably less than that they should be seriously asking themselves if they should be ramping it up. And if people are asking noticeably more they should be seriously asking themselves if they should be turning it down.
I think that people receiving requests should tend to look for signals that suggest that the person makes few/many requests, and be more inclined to be positive if they make few or more inclined to be negative if they make many—in order to try to get the overall incentive landscape right to encourage people to make about the right number of requests. Of course this is kind of hard to detect particularly if someone is cold emailing you … anyone have better ideas?
Is this a few times each person, or a few times total? It’s hard for me to tell because either seems slightly off to me.
I meant like maybe 3-15 times total (“few” was too ambiguous to be a good word choice).
Writing that out maybe I want to change it to 3-30 (the top end of which doesn’t feel quite like “a few”). And I can already feel how I should be giving more precise categories // how taking what I said literally will mean not doing enough asking in some important circumstances, even if I stand by my numbers in some important spiritual sense.
Anyway I’m super interested to get other people’s guesses about the right numbers here. (Perhaps with better categories.)
Sure that makes more sense to me. I was previously reading “few” as 2-4 times, and was thinking that’s way too few times to be asking for help from coworkers total in a week, but a bit too high to be asking (many) specific senior people for help each year.
My guess is that it’s just very context dependent — I’m not sure how generalisable these sorts of numbers are.
It also seems like the size of favours would vary a ton and make it hard to give a helpful number.
I’m sure it’s context dependent and depends on size of favours. But I’m not sure it depends that much—and I’m worried that if we don’t discuss numbers it’s easy for people who are naturally disinclined to ask to think “oh I’m probably doing this enough already” (or people who are naturally inclined to do this a lot already to think “oh yeah I totally need to do that more”).
Maybe you could give a context where you think my numbers are badly off?