# SageMode

### Key Definitions

Definitions from Deep Work by Cal Newport.

**Deep Work**

> Deep work is made up of professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive abilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill and are hard to replicate (similar in concept to purposeful practice)

**Shallow Work**

> Shallow work is made up of non-cognitively demanding, logistical style tasks often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

### An Important Note

I disagree with the part about shallow work 'not creating much value'. Shallow work is very valuable. It's just more common in this space, where much of the collaberation happens on noisy platforms like Discord.

## Challenges

*(Most of these things are great and not challenges in themselves )*

### Remote Working

- Working in our own environment blocks us from the usual non-sensical distractions of the office, but opens a new set of distractions.
- Most people do not know eachother's phone numbers, which would have been the backup, emergency line someone might use if they were trying to focus.
- Most of our coordination tools rely on some form of Web2. Many use attention as a form of revenue.
- Distractions beget distractions. Often one distraction can lead to many others if left unchecked.

### Discord

- Discord, like many web2 apps, relies on user attention to earn revenue. While far more honest and less manipulative than something like Twitter, it does strive to distract us.
- Discord cannot effectively differentiate a DM from someone new who I would like to talk to from the thousands of mindless assholes spamming obvious scams to our DMs.
- Useful tools like Collabland and Seshbot require us to leave our DMs open, preventing us from solving that problem with a DM block on non-friend users.
- Turning off alerts or turning off Discord prevents us from knowing about things that are 100% crucial.
- Coordinating like this is new. We're not fully aware of how to use this stuff. Often we type out long, technical discussions when a 2 minute voice call meeting would have sufficed. Or we have voice calls when only a couple simple questions need to be answered. We need to identify when to use which tool.

### DAOs

- Accountability. While having a boss or a supervisor does run counter the DAO ethos, we've yet find a way to replace that accountbility mechanism with something better.
- DAO security. We need to be around to vote down bad proposals, kick out bad actors, and make sure our product isn't getting destroyed by hackers. This prevents us from turning off completely.
- Decision Making. Probably one of biggest major challenges to a DAO where everyone has a say. If everyone has a say, that means everyone needs to decide. Making big-picture decisions well is extraordinarly difficult. Trying to juggle that with Deep Work is next to impossible.
- This has some more hidden costs that I want to riff on even more. These big picture decisions are incredibly crucial and at some points existential. One wrong decision might cause the whole thing to collapse months or years down the line.
- Often we debate the same topics over and over, covering multiple meetings over many months. The reason it takes so long is that there are so many tradeoffs and considerations at stake. In situations where there isn't a silver bullet, Deep Work could save us a lot of time.
- Issues appear differently on the surface. Sometimes drilling deep reveals that we're dealing with something else completely.

### The Ecosystem

- FOMO. There's always another token/NFT launch. The more we have our eyeballs glued to Discord the more we get paid.
- Sadly, platforms like Twitter is where a lot of the discussion happens.

## Solutions

Let me start by saying that everything in here should 100% voluntary, and recommended for anyone who would actually see any benefit.

This is not an attempt to tell others how to think or use their mind, it just gives them the freedom to choose which mode to employ and when.

**Using Roles**
- Emergency role. If someone's taking our treasury, then we use that. If we're getting hacked, we use that. This won't work for SageMode (more on that later), but it's helpful for those who aren't. Why not just use the WarCamp role? Because this is for emergencies only. It can filter everything else.
- Voting Roles (Time sensitive/Quorum). If we need people to be at a certain place at certain time, it makes sense to build a habit around that. Not only does this limit distractions, but it would improve voter turnout.

*It's worth noting that in the two above examples we could actual use this to layer on responsibilites for DAOs where voting is crucial*

**New Bots?**
- Perhaps there are new bots we can find that don't allow pirates and fiends of crypto to flood our DMs with trash.
- If not, we can try to pressure the makers of these bots to allow this.
- If it's a Discord problem, then the folks who really want to focus will need to come up with their own solutions probably.

**Batching Governance**
- Instead of hashing out

**Routines and Deadlines**
- Self explanatory. More of a personal thing, but it always helps.

**SageMode**
- This is the main solution.
- We form pairs and take turns focusing.
- The person who is currently focusing needs a separate SageMode account. They only add their buddy as a friend on that account.
- The person who is not in SageMode acts as a filter, passing on anything that's an emergency, and filtering out the rest.
- The person who is in SageMode can also set times of the day when they can hold Office Hours. If they are really holding work up by not meeting with another member, the buddy can send along the message.
- There's a locked SageMode channel on Discord that posts:
- Who is in SageMode
- Instruction for how to send a message along (buddy if urgent; DMs on original account if not)
- How long their SageMode will last
- When they surface to respond to all their messages
- Office hours.
- The person who is in SageMode is responsible