Hamming's Important Problems Question, 1986, Applied to a Life

“If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?”

Richard Hamming says he asked that at lunch, and it cost him his seat. In his 1986 talk “You and Your Research,” he describes walking over to the chemistry table in the Bell Labs dining hall, where he knew Dave McCall, and asking, “What are the important problems of your field?” A week later he moved on to “What important problems are you working on?” Eventually he came out with the line above. “I wasn’t welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!”

That is the whole idea, and it travels outside laboratories better than most of the advice that came out of Bell Labs. People who feel they never achieve anything are rarely idle. They are busy on problems that do not matter to them, usually because those problems are the ones with a visible inbox.

What did Hamming actually claim?

The talk was given on March 7, 1986 to an overflow crowd of about 200 at Bell Communications Research in Morristown, New Jersey, and J. F. Kaiser transcribed it from tape. Hamming was by then a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and a retired Bell Labs scientist. His question was why so few scientists do significant work, and his answer was blunt: “If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems.”

He added that the average scientist “does routine safe work almost all the time and so he (or she) doesn’t produce much.” He also noticed that McCall took the remark seriously. By the fall McCall stopped him in the hall and said it had “got underneath my skin.”

Notice what Hamming did not say. He did not say that important people work harder. He said they pick differently.

Is “important” just “big”?

No, and this is the part people skip. Hamming’s definition has a catch: “It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack.”

Curing aging is consequential. If you have no way in, it is not an important problem for you, it is a daydream with good branding. The useful version of the question has two halves: does this matter, and do I have a plausible first move? A problem that passes both is rarer than it sounds. Most people can name five that pass one.

What did the open door have to do with it?

Hamming’s second observation is the one that makes the first practical. “If you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.” The person with the open door “gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.”

Output now versus direction later. A calendar full of closed-door hours can still be pointed at the wrong target for a decade, and nothing in the daily numbers will tell you.

What was Great Thoughts Time?

His fix was a standing appointment. After urging from John Tukey and others he adopted what he called “Great Thoughts Time”: from Friday lunch onward, he discussed only big questions, such as “How will computers change science?” He later summed it up as “Friday afternoons for years - great thoughts only - means that I committed 10% of my time trying to understand the bigger problems in the field.”

His reason was an embarrassment he caught himself in. He had believed one thing and “spent all week marching in `that’ direction.” The remedy was not more discipline. It was looking at the gap, then fixing whichever side was wrong.

One example of what it produced: Hamming says he told vice presidents that nine of ten experiments were run in the lab and one on a computer, and that it would flip. “They knew I was a crazy mathematician and had no sense of reality.” He gives no data for the claim, so treat it as recollection. It shows what the time was for, though: a view the week’s tasks would never have produced.

A test you can run this week

Hamming’s version needs a lab. A usable one needs a page.

1. Write down the three problems that would matter most if they moved in the next year. One sentence each. For each, add whether you have a reasonable attack, meaning you know what the first hour would be.
2. Open your calendar and task list from the last seven days.
3. Next to each problem, write the hours you spent on it.

Most people who do this honestly find a zero or near-zero, next to a week that felt crowded. That is not a character flaw. It is what happens when important problems have no deadline and no one waiting, and unimportant ones have both. The same pattern shows up in the Eisenhower matrix attributed to a 1954 speech, a tool for the same problem of urgent work crowding out the rest.

If the list is hard to write, that is data too. Hamming’s complaint about the chemistry table was precisely that people could not answer.

Where does Hamming’s advice break?

Several places.

Survivorship. Hamming’s sample is the people who became famous, plus his own career. He knew Shannon and Tukey, and he was selecting stories after the outcome was known. He also could not tell which scientists chose important problems and failed anyway, because those never end up in a talk. Abraham Wald’s bullet-hole logic applies: the quiet failures are missing from the pile.

Causation. He admits it himself: “I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ‘The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.’” The open-door correlation might be a personality trait, not a habit you can copy.

Privilege. A Bell Labs job came with salary, colleagues, and a boss who tolerated Friday afternoons of thinking. Hamming pre-empts this (“you might tell me you haven’t got control over what you have to work on”) and answers that it comes with seniority. For someone with two jobs or a child under three, a tenth of the week is not a gift they can simply claim.

Luck. He grants “a fair element of luck” and settles on Pasteur: “Luck favors the prepared mind.” His own framing is that the particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not. That is a claim about odds, and odds are not guarantees.

None of that rescues the unimportant problem. It just means the test shows where your time went. It does not prove that moving it will pay.

Where does a morning hour fit?

If Hamming is right that a tenth of the week should go to the real question, the cheapest place to put it is early. Nobody has scheduled against it, nobody is interrupting, and the day has not yet made its demands. The trouble is that a block with no witness is the first to get traded for sleep.

That is the gap DontSnooze fills: when the alarm goes off you have 30 seconds to record a short video showing you are up, and if you miss it, a random photo from your camera roll goes to your friends. The consequence is what turns a vague intention to work on the thing that matters into a block that exists.

If the important problem keeps losing to a pile of half-started ones, a cap on how many you work on at once, as in this WIP-limit setup, is the practical first move.

Pick one of the three problems from the list. Write its first hour on a sticky note and put it where the phone charges tonight.