Please stop working so hard
It hurts me and is exhausting to watch
Why is the “easy” answer to every problem “I’m just going to buckle down and work harder?”
This shit drives me nuts. It’s everywhere. More more more. Never enough. Never results, either, just more activity. More movement. When this hamster wheel hits top speed, get a bigger wheel. Fuck it, everyone else should have a hamster wheel too. YOU get a hamster wheel, and YOU get a hamster wheel and WHO gets a hamster wheel and WHO am I becoming?
It’s heartbreaking to watch people burn out while not even getting the results they work so hard for. It’s difficult to realize, from time to time, that I’ve wandered into a hamster wheel myself, and it’s picking up speed. How could I have wandered into a hamster wheel without realizing? How is it even possible to not realize that the floor is moving and every step forward rocks you back and forth?
In her viral piece on millennial burnout, Anne Helen Petersen wrote:
For the past two years, I’ve refused cautions — from editors, from family, from peers — that I might be edging into burnout. To my mind, burnout was something aid workers, or high-powered lawyers, or investigative journalists dealt with. It was something that could be treated with a week on the beach. I was still working, still getting other stuff done — of course I wasn’t burned out.
Hustle culture. Corporate culture. Capitalist culture. Pick the “[word] + culture” combination that you want to blame (cancel culture? Not sure how it applies here but it seems to be the scapegoat du jour). When the culprit is culture the default answer becomes “remove yourself from the culture,” but I think that’s exactly the real problem.
Default answers.
What happens when you have a problem at work? You go to fix the problem. But how do you decide what approach to use, what tools you need?
Ideally it would come from a deep understanding of your field, shared across all stakeholders, informed by the narrower data from your own company and experience. You would diagnose how various factors affect your situation, and the path to influence those factors would be clear.
That sounds familiar, right? That’s totally how it works, yeah?
Ha, good one. (It’s not really a good one, you don’t have to laugh). It happens, but usually the problem-solving “strategy” doesn’t involve choosing your tools so much as throwing your toolbox at the problem.
Because the “default answer” to a problem is “work harder on that problem.”
Hard work should never, ever be your first step
Here, I wrote you a screenplay.
*A problem appears, stage left. It looks like Keanu Reeves.*
Everyone: “Ahhhhh a problem! Get the toolbox get the toolbox.”
*Jerry throws a hammer at the problem. The problem doesn’t react.*
Everyone: “Oh noooooooooo! Throw something else!”
*Tool after tool flies at the problem. Screwdriver. Wrench. Allen key. Pliers. Measuring tape. Box cutters. The problem is like Neo from the Matrix and dodges everything.*
Aaaaaaand scene.
Is this what your work looks like? A problem appears, and different members of the team throw their expertise at it without pausing to think. The “answer” is “buckle down and try harder,” even though that creates a ton of extra work and if you really looked at Keanu you’d obviously see that his one weakness is a socket wrench (which no one tried).
What, frustratingly, doesn’t happen is everyone taking a breath and taking a look. Richard Rumelt writes in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy:
The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.
When hard work is the default answer, people work long hours and burn themselves out on problems that could have been solved more easily with 20 minutes of planning.
And you know what, that’s fine for individuals. It’s not great, but I’ve long since accepted the things I cannot change, and if your default answer is to buckle down well then you go for it.
It doesn’t work for teams. When individuals in an organization have the “buckle down” response, it spills over to every other member of the team. The whole reason we have teams is that people working together can accomplish more and bigger things — so of course most answers to an org problem involve multiple people.
And that’s no good, because the number of distractions goes waaaayyyy the fuck up as you add more people to the team. Each team member is a little ball of entropy, and the more people you have, the higher the probability that one day you’ll see a hand saw go flying past your desk and the next day you’ll get smacked in the face by a flashlight.
This is how large groups of people work in circles for months at a time. This is how big teams work on the wrong projects for six months — or how they get distracted by every tiny little “opportunity” that appears, and six months later have spent all their time reacting to smoke alarms (whether or not there’s a fire).
Chess legend and former world champion Garry Kasparov says “it is better to have a bad plan than no plan,” and he’s right.
To have a bad plan, you have to at least do some planning. That means looking at the situation for what it is before pulling out your lathe (I am running out of tools to name); your plan doesn’t need to be perfect to help you organize your work, and rallying a team around a so-so plan still cuts down on random acts. Once you have a guiding approach, hard work is the path forward.
Why is it always a certain type of hard work?
There are 10 million books about productivity, and they have titles like “The Productivity Project,” “The 30-Day Productivity Plan,” “Make Time,” “Productivity for Procrastinators,” and “Eat That Frog.” In most cases, the author’s main “production” is a book about productivity.
Even as people are starting to rebel against hustle culture, 60-hour weeks, and the idea that everything you do needs to be somehow “productive,” there’s still a pervasive glorification of hard work.
Coworkers complain/brag about how much work they do. You get more face-time with the boss when you’re the only two left in the office at night. Within a company, everyone has a sense of who works the most and not the most, and even when people say that long hours aren’t important, working long hours commands a degree of respect.
Shit, I’m writing a rant against hard work, and I still feel the need to clarify that I generally work pretty hard so that you won’t judge me.
Hard work glorification is perverse and not just pervasive because it only extends to a certain type of hard work.
Once upon a time I went into a conference room with my computer and a notebook and wrote 1500 words per hour for 4 hours straight. These were detailed thoughts about strategy that led to an organization change, a hiring surge on my team, and huge impact on the business overall. For those 4 hours I was 100% focused. My brain was firing on all cylinders. Smoke came out of my ears. That document guided my strategy for two years. The entire rest of that day I was burnt. Could barely think. The day after was unproductive and mind-wandering.
That’s hard work, and it was good work. But it’s not long hours (it’s actually fewer hours) and it’s not especially visible unless the smoke from my ears sets off the fire alarm.
What would have happened had I gone in the next day and said “actually, um, I worked pretty hard yesterday sooooooo…..” and just left? I never did, so I don’t know, but somehow I don’t think it would command the same respect as the people who stay chatting and medium-productive several hours late. I’ve been one of those people too.
The top productivity book is “Getting Things Done.” Why isn’t it called “Getting the Right Things Done?”
Richard Rumelt:
“Bad strategy tends to skip over pesky details such as problems. It ignores the power of choice and focus, trying instead to accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests. Like a quarterback whose only advice to teammates is “Let’s win,” bad strategy covers up its failure to guide by embracing the language of broad goals, ambition, vision, and values. Each of these elements is, of course, an important part of human life. But, by themselves, they are not substitutes for the hard work of strategy.”
When hard work is the beginning, middle, and end, the work is wasted. Energy dissipates into the air instead of being focused and charging up a battery or making the car move forward. People run on their hamster wheels in the hopes that the little lightbulb will flicker on, and never realize that the wheel isn’t even plugged in.
Hard work is important, but it should only ever be the middle. In steps:
Define the problem and your strategy
Hard work
Celebrate with perfectly ripe, delicious fresh fruit. I like pineapples.