In Western society, middle managers are routined satired, looked down on, and made fodder for all sorts of jokes and bad feelings. They're almost never celebrated.
And perhaps rightfully so, in most companies. No-one aspires to be a middle manager, so if you're stuck there long-term in the average company, you probably ain't any good as an executive or senior manager.
But middle managers are better at one thing than the vast majority of us:
Making decisions.
A poor quality middle manager still has tons of decisions come at them, and have to make judgment calls on all of them. When to brief people, how to schedule meetings, how to allocate resources, and a million little things related to paperwork, achieving objectives, and coordinating people.
The thing you find about decisions when you have a lot of them is that often they're not hard to make and don't require much brainpower -- yet, making decisions is hugely mentally taxing. The warning/alarm system in the brain designed to keep us out of trouble in much more simple environments now runs out of control when confronted with the complexities of modern society. There's even a phrase for it in academia -- decision fatigue.
Right now, in one of my email inboxes, I have 54 messages. 18 of those came in the last 24 hours. That's already pruned down, none of those are newsletters. Every single one of them represents decisions that need to be made or actions that need to be taken.
As exhausting as it can be, it's an excellent training ground -- because Baydin's Email Game provides the perfect training ground for getting more done.
The short version is this -- decisionmaking gets easier the more you practice doing it fast. Tons of decisions you have to make are completely arbitrary -- should the phonecall be at 3PM or 4PM, should people meet at your home or at the restaurant, what's the next action on this project, and so on.
Most people feel a certain mental pain when decisions are unclear -- confusion is unpleasant. And even making arbitrary decisions without a clearly correct one can be mentally taxing.
Hence, the role of middle managers, much of whose entire job is to make largely arbitrary decisions.
But you can get better at this by following this one guideline -- look at one thing at a time, and don't do anything else until the decision is made.
Easy to say, hard to do.
But it makes something like the Email Game a very worthwhile training ground: in it, it shows you exactly one email at a time. When you play a round of it, you simply refuse to skip a message, and work through every single one of them in order until you're complete.
This forces you to make a decision without interrupting yourself, and even gives you a score with points at the end based on how fast you went and how many mails you processed through.
The general rule applies everywhere -- one thing at a time, look at it until you decide, never look at it again. Easy to say and hard to do, so look for opportunities to train in rapid decisionmaking. Getting a middle management position might be a little extreme, but dealing intelligently with tons of decisions coming at you is wonderful training.