That is great! I also found this book really helpful, but maybe a bit less engrossing than Rory found it, hahaâin general, I feel like it has a bit of a slow burn that, when you make it through the full thing, does a good job at really lodging a way of thinking into your brain. So I would recommend sticking with it even if it seems like you are not immediately getting tons of insights :)
Jessica McCurdyđ¸
Karma: 2,124
GrowÂing ReÂquires Growth: BuildÂing the SysÂtems BeÂhind CEAâs ComÂmuÂnity Expansion
Something Iâve reflected on a lot this year is that having a real strategy means the things you let go of should hurt (because they were really valuable). The non-monetary support side of the CBG program is a case where both things are true: this is the right direction for CEAâs focus, and something real is being lost. Iâm grateful to Naomi for guiding us through this difficult decision, and for naming that honestly in this post.
CEA is growÂing again: 25% more peoÂple enÂgaged with our proÂgrams in 2025
Quick Pitch for Using Toggl
Reduces task switching:
Actively changing the task in Toggl makes you more aware of switching.
Helps maintain focus on one task longer.
For small or miscellaneous tasks, I use grouped categories (e.g. âSmallsâ, âSlack/âemailâ) and batch them.
Tracks time against priorities:
Allows reflection on whether your actual time spent aligns with your intended priorities.
Easy to spot when too much time is going to low-priority tasks.
Improves time estimation:
Over time, you get calibrated on how long tasks really take.
Some tasks consistently take longer than expected.
Some tasks youâve procrastinated on turn out to be quick (e.g. took 5 mins).
Supports manager alignment:
Makes it easier to discuss priorities and time allocation with your manager
Helps identify tasks that could be delegated or streamlined.
Useful for recognizing when something is taking more time than baselines
Assists with planning:
Helps forecast quarterly workloads using historical data.
Useful when planning repeated projects (e.g. hiring) by reviewing how much time it took previously.
Thank you for sharing this! I think it is a really great and helpful read and highlights some important values that I identify with. I have already shared it a few times :)
Thanks for sharing your experiences and reflections here â I really appreciate the thoughtfulness. I want to offer some context on the group organizer situation you described, as someone who was running the university groups program at the time.
On the strategy itself:
At the time, our scalable programs were pretty focused from evidence we had seen that much of the impact came from the organizers themselves. We of course did want groups to go well more generally, but in deciding where to put our marginal resource we were focusing on group organizers. It was a fairly unintuitive strategy â and I get how that could feel misaligned or even misleading if it wasnât clearly communicated.On communication:
We did try to be explicit about this strategy â it was featured at organizer retreats and in parts of our support programming. But we didnât consistently communicate it across all our materials. That inconsistency was an oversight on our part. Definitely not an attempt to be deceptive â just something that didnât land as clearly as we hoped.Where weâre at now:
Weâve since updated our approach. The current strategy is less focused narrowly on organizers and more on helping groups be great overall. That said, we still think a lot of the value often comes from a small, highly engaged core â which often includes organizers, but not exclusively.In retrospect, I wish weâd communicated this more clearly across the board. When a strategy is unintuitive, a few clear statements in a few places often isnât enough to make it legible. Sorry again if this felt off â I really appreciate you surfacing it.
Thank you for thoughtfully engaging! On the growth team side, Angelina is unfortunately ill right now, but we plan on responding to this in a few days when she gets back :)
I just want to quickly note that I think there are a lot of people who would resonate with the principles of EA but havenât heard about it. Very few people have heard of EA, and while there are some methodological nuances to be had with this study, it suggests that the number of EA-sympathetic students on NYUâs campus is over 5x the number of students who were sympathetic and familiar with EA. So generally, I think there is a lot of potential growth available of people who do strongly align to EA principles.
You could argue that growth mechanisms to find these people would still lead to the movement having weaker commitment to the principles. I address some adjacent points in my response to Neelâs comment here.
Thanks Neel! Iâve jotted down some quick clarifications below.
Overall: as I mentioned in my previous comment, I donât think growth is obviously good and there are a lot of various risks to be aware of. I also think that even though it is only one of four strategy pillars at CEA it is a somewhat easier pillar for us to contribute to as we have more foundations for it. That could mean us unintentionally prioritizing it too much, and that is something I am trying to track. So, overall, I am sympathetic to a lot of your concerns but generally am more optimistic about this direction (as Iâll discuss below).
Some more specific clarifications:
We are trying to grow EA over time, not just during this year. Growing over time will require doing things like working on brand, foundation building, and rehabilitation. We are serious about the âsustainableâ part of growth and growth itself is only one of our four major strategy pillars this year.
We are not optimizing for growth â our vision is currently to aim for moderate, sustainable growth (versus growth at all costs). We think growth over time will be important for EA to reach its full potential, but optimizing for it would likely be counterproductive to impact goals for various reasons, as you say.
We are trying to grow the number of people involved in EA across the entire funnel, not just at the top. So part of growth is helping people become more high context/âhelping high context people progress in their involvement and impact.
I think that retention of people already energized by EA is an important part of growth (if people leave or become demotivated this is of course bad for growth!) â part of this project is thinking about how to double down and revitalize the existing community, and not just about how to bring in new people.
I think itâs appropriate that some EA community building programs have some context level barrier to entry (for instance in-person EA Global events have an admissions policy), whereas some donât (the EA Newsletter is designed to be a no-barrier intro to EA). My general take is that different spaces should continue to optimize for people with different levels of context. For many of the context-restricted programs, I am actively fighting for âlowering the barâ to be off the table as a growth strategy.
Quick response to another piece:
I think Reflections and lessons from Effective Ventures is a nice example of some of the post morteming etc. I am not saying this is /âenough/â but wanted to flag the example as writing it took a fair amount of capacity and shows some work in this area.
Hi, Iâm Jessica, and I lead the growth pillar of CEAâs strategy. Iâm excited about the potential for the EA community to grow and for EA ideas to reach more people, and I wanted to share how weâre thinking about that growth.
Our main goal is the same as EAâs: to help others as effectively as possible. We believe that growing the EA community can help us achieve more of the good we want to see in the world. While the community isnât perfect, Iâm proud of its accomplishments. I believe it can help many more people increase their impactâwhile the EA community can benefit from new perspectives, experiences, and domain knowledge..
That said, weâre very aware that growth comes with risks. As the post mentions, weâre not trying to grow EA at all costs. Growth isnât our only goal, and weâve put internal principles in place to avoid compromising our core values in pursuit of scale. I feel pretty good about where we are on that.
Other concerns are harder to track, like increased risk from risky actors joining our community, scandals, or undesired change in community culture, ambition, or epistemics leading us to be less effective overall. Thereâs also the concern that our strategies could lead to many people getting involved in EA, but their involvement is not overall positive (either for them or the world, e.g., if they feel they donât have good ways to contribute immediately).
These are real concerns, and weâre actively tracking them. I used to be more skeptical about EA growth myself. But overall, Iâm excited about aiming for moderate, sustainable growth at the current marginâmoving the trajectory upward while managing risks carefully. We want and need the communityâs help in spotting those risks early.
I also lead the Groups Team, and I want to briefly speak to group organizers: I could imagine someone reading this update and making major changes to their group strategy based on CEAâs growth focus. Please donât over-update based on this. We continue to advocate for advertising your programs broadly at the start of the semester (and specific points in the year for non-uni groups) and then focusing on a smaller group of people who are taking the ideas most seriously. If our advice changes, weâll share that clearly through our usual channels (Slack, newsletter, advising calls, etc.).
The guidance in our existing materialsâlike this advice post, my EAG talk on common pitfalls in community building, and our Resource Center âstill stands. We think groups trying to grow too much can be counterproductive to their goals. We care deeply about more than just numbers, that hasnât changed under our new strategy.
Finally, I may not have time to engage much in comments, but please do reach out to groups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org with any questions or concerns.
Agus is one of my favorite people I have ever worked with! Would recommend :)
Quick take on Burnout
Note: I am obviously not an expert here nor do I have much first hand experience but I thought it could be useful for people I work with to know how I currently conceptualize burnout. I was then encouraged to post on the forum. This is based off around 4 cases of burnout that I have seen (at varying levels of proximity) and conversations with people who have seen significantly more.
Different Conceptions of Burnout
Basic conception that people often have: working too hard until energy is depleted.
Yes, working too hard can lead to exhaustion, but thereâs a difference between exhaustion and burnout.
Exhaustion vs. Burnout
Exhaustion:
Result of working very hard/â a lot of hours. Possibly including sleep deprivation or just brain fog.
Can often be resolved with a short break or vacation (eg: one week)
Burnout:
More pervasive and affects many areas of life/âwork. While it shared many physical symptoms of exhaustion, it is deeper.
A short vacation isnât sufficient to resolve it.
Core Feelings Tied to Burnout
Burnout is often tied to more core feelings like motivation, recognition, and feeling good about the work youâre doing. It is more tied to your feelings of motivation and value than pure sleep deprivation or lack of rest. If someone is unsure of the value of their work and isnât super recognized, especially if theyâre also working really hard, that can really get into your brain and feels like a recipe for burnout.
Importance of Motivation
This is why I stress the value of motivation so much
Nuance: we should distinguish motivation from being overly enthusiastic about programs.
Jessica take is that we should have set times for re-evaluating the value of programs. Having set evaluation times helps reduce constant worry about program value but still maintains our ability to have a critical eye toward making sure we are having a large impact.
To some extent motivation is a very moldable thing and if you want to try and get more motivated, you can (but it often includes help from others like your manager and team)
Quick note
This isnât me advocating for exhaustion because it isnât burnout. I think exhaustion can be very counterproductive and leads to future hours being less productive.
My main thing here is that I donât think our LFG /â work hard culture is the recipe for burnout. I think being uncertain of the value of our programs, facing many internal structural changes, and not being on top of motivation can be. This is part of why I am excited about the M&E work we are doing, people doing tour of duties, and people tracking motivation/âactively valuing it.
Jessica addition in Dec. 2024:
Getting sick more often than usual is an indicator to be aware of. This can lead to a spiral of âGet sick, get less done, get more stressed and feel like you are not doing good enough/ânot feeling good about your work, that stress causing you to get more sick/âget sick againâ
(I will add for the forum that right now I am feeling really good about the value of our programs but its always good to be approaching programs critically to ensure you are having the most impact :) )
Very quickly: I feel like itâs useful to share that I did this survey and found it very hard, and a lot of other people did too. In particular, it did feel pretty rushed for such difficult questions that we didnât necessarily have a fully informed pre-existing take on. OP does mention this, but I wanted to stress that for people reading this post.
I still think it has a lot of useful information and is directionally very informative. I might get a chance to write up more thoughts here, but I am not sure I will be able to. I mostly wanted to give a quick additional flag :)
Thanks for sharing this! The power of prompts and letting go of nice to haves have been things Iâve noticed in my work as well. Good luck with your future efforts here!
I have found rocket money to be quite helpful!
Rekindling the Fire: PrinÂciÂples-First EA Groups as a Path to ImÂpact [Talk TranÂscript]
Thank you! And thank you so much for your podcastsâlike I mentioned in the post I found them really helpful and relatable and am grateful for you sharing so much!
Iâm on buproprion xl and generally they donât recommend taking it at night because it can cause insomnia but Iâm really lucky and have never really had problems with that. Instead, I just found waking up in the morning extremely difficultâI often woke up sad and just wanted to stay in bed and keep sleeping (even if I had slept a really long time). Due to the extended release, taking it at night means that peak effects are now happening in the mornings when I was most sad /â low motivation before. So that was honestly just really great for me.
This is super interesting! How do you do the experiments? Do you change one thing at a time and track?
Hey Harri, thanks for writing this, and thanks to everyone engaging with it.
I lead the growth pillar at CEA, so Iâll just speak to that (as opposed to diversifying funding or improving the brand, which are the other outward-facing pillars of CEAâs 2025-26 strategy). Within talent growth, I am not going to be able to respond to every point made in your post or in the comments.
I wonât pretend the answers here are obvious. Together with my team, I think about growth and its tradeoffs a lot, and one of the few things weâre sure about is that there are real opportunity costs in either direction, whether we take a more growth-centric approach or we donât. I think reasonable people can come to different conclusions about whatâs right to prioritize and to what degree.
An important part of my own model is that EAâs question-nature matters, but a question that never gets acted on doesnât help anyone. The acting is where impact comes from. Thatâs something we try to capture in our metrics, and part of why I think itâs important to have metrics at all, to track whether impactful actions are being taken, not just whether the ideas are alive. That being said, there are no perfect metrics, they all come with downsides and risk of goodharting.
Our growth team, not to mention the rest of CEA, think itâs really important that the EA community stays healthy. I am keen for people to share with us any data or evidence suggesting there are places where our actions are undermining the health of the community (e.g. not meeting established quality bars), so we can factor it into our strategy or tactics.
We recently wrote more on why we value growth and the risks that weâre tracking in this post. And you can see more on how we think about maintaining quality with growth in this section (with more information on our G.R.O.W. principles here).