I’m not sure why grunt work is looked down upon by people who engage in creative work.
I’ve had these thoughts show up earlier, but I ran into this line of thinking again yesterday when I was sifting through a lot of data at work.
Some context: RepX is a conversational AI sales agent for websites from Storylane. We have an early version of it embedded on our own website here.
I’m the product lead for the team building this. Everyday, we’re figuring out things to prioritize and what not to focus on as we try to get our our pilot customers to success with the product.
Sometimes, we choose to build something and new insights pop up as we background-think problems and analyze user feedback and conversation data we have. We then edit what we’re building quickly based on these insights.
Yesterday, I spent 3-4 hours manually going through every conversation that visitors have had with Lily, Storylane’s very own RepX agent. Despite sending these conversations to our Claude account for deeper analysis, I wanted to take all the time in the world to manually go through these conversations. And I did!
I started by setting up split windows. On the left was a Slack channel where I could read all the conversations users had with Lily on our website. On another, I started noting down each granular topic that every visitor talked about.
I was literally maintaining a counter going through every topic on this spreadsheet. This is what anyone would call grunt work. But I enjoyed every second of it.
We often tend to associate creative work with flow state, but grunt work doesn’t get enough credit usually for moving your mind into the same meditative stillness you experience when doing work that’s considered creative.
In the hours I spent reading through and analyzing conversations, my mind was quiet and fully immersed in doing what I was doing, even though I wasn’t doing anything you would label as creative.
This made me realize there are grunt-work highs like creative highs. We just don’t give talk about grunt-work highs or give them enough credit, because we look down upon grunt work by default.
But we really need to embrace the grunt work highs to get to the creative highs. They are, in fact, complementary to the creative work most of us engage in.
Society has created this perception about creatives as people who truly dislike doing mind-numbing, boring work that doesn’t require half a brain. Some creatives believe in this perception by themselves or because that’s what society has fed them consistently.
I think that’s a belief that only true for amateur creatives who’ve done very few creative projects all their life.
Mature creatives and knowledge workers know that if you embrace certain pieces of work (like having to sift through large amounts of data), you’re going to walk out with a lot more creative ideas than you ever had – because you now see patterns in problems that you just didn’t see before as your mind makes fresh connections between those patterns and forms insights.
If you analyze engineering logs, for instance, some of your weaker ideas to fix tech debt get the conviction within you that they deserve. If you spend time looking at financial statements deeply every week – you would now get a sense of how money moves out and into your organization and how you can cut costs or improve profits. Ideas that didn’t come up before at all, until you did the grunt work to deserve seeing them.
Grunt work, I contend, should be seen as something that’s truly complementary to creative work.
If you run into mental blocks or feel cranky not having worked on anything creative, it’s the art of grunt work you need to embrace. Not praying to God waiting for ideas to show up.
Shankar is thinking 