why you're dying at your desk
Calls. Emails. Quick responses to Slack messages.
Memos. Powerpoints. To do lists a hundred items long.
Starting early. Staying late. Taking work home with you.
You’re really busy, maybe close to burnout. But are you really getting anything done?
Millennials and productivity experts are questioning the distinction between time in the office and time spent working with increasing frequency. These questions will change our future of work.
At most companies, there are implicit expectations about how your boss wants you to work that get in the way of getting work done. Part of this is unavoidable; when you eat a Reese’s cup, you have to make it through the chocolate to get to the peanut butter.
You’re unintentionally creating a thicker layer of chocolate to eat through.
Work culture is driven by the behavior of everyone at a company and reinforced by the policies and unwritten rules created by the people who work there. If your boss works like a maniac and logs hours longer than Elon Musk, you’ll probably follow suit or be plagued by anxiety, regardless of your individual needs and preferences. Each of us perpetuates the problems created by the always on mentality.
Long hours don’t equal hard work. They just equal long hours. The time you put in has nothing to do with how hard something is. - Jason Fried, If You’re Reading This, You Probably Don’t Do Hard Work
Put the company first, always go above and beyond, follow the rules. These are guiding principles of demonstrating a disciplined work ethic that make you a great hire and more likely to get promoted. Perceived productivity often trumps relentless focus on actual priorities.
Do bosses actually want team members to do the most though? As a boss and an employee, I really don’t think so.
Here’s why: doing a bunch of stuff and showing face does not equal meaningful work, and our future is meaningful work. Burnout happens when your work isn’t tied back to and executed with extrinsic and intrinsic purpose.
Your boss doesn’t want you to die at your desk, but this is why it might feel like you will:
you don't know what's important
Your job description contains a partial or complete to do list, but with constantly changing OKRs, initiatives and team members, it can be unclear what you uniquely need to focus on to get or keep the company flywheel moving. And if you work at a startup, you might not even have a job description.
With room for interpretation or in the absence of a job description entirely, figuring out how to spend your time is hard. Lack of clarity around what to do can lead you to do all of the things, reducing your work to a daily or weekly to do list. When you’re focused on just getting stuff done, you don’t pause to question the importance of each thing you’re moving forward. You’re too busy.
Getting stuff done is important when you’re getting started, but within 6 months of being in a role you should be able to look up and see the sky. Can you distill your work into it’s 1-2 sentence core purpose? If you can do this, you can filter out all of the brain eating activities that are nice to do but killing your productivity.
It’s likely that you’re either in(heriting) a job that has been done the same way for a long time, or coming into a newly, hypothetically created role.
If you’re in or inheriting a job that’s been around for awhile, break down what you’re doing in a given day week and month line by line to evaluate and prioritize your work against the current and evolving needs of the business.
Goals and priorities change. What’s possible today may not have been possible when the role was created a month or a year let alone a decade ago. Breaking down your job into discrete pieces allows you to assess how and if each responsibility is adding value, how much value it’s adding, and whether or not you really need to do it.
If you’re in a new role, chances are the team and/or your boss identified a gap and filled it with a bunch of activities that will, hypothetically, fill that gap. It’s up to you to validate, beta test and iterate on it.
Your boss wants you to figure out what’s important.
you're working hard, but you aren't getting anywhere
Your boss wants you to value your time enough to focus on the highest leverage activities only you can do.
If you’re in a constant state of overwhelm with the mountain of inane work that you hate doing, it can feel impossible to dig yourself out. And that’s ok. You are still in the learning vs. experienced phase of your job.
The more you practice, the easier your job gets. When it becomes automatic though, you have to make a choice to accept or reject stagnation. It’s better coming from you than waiting for someone else to uncover the obvious area of improvement:
Managers have to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: “If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?” If the answer is no, the organization has to ask, “So what do we do now?” And it has to do something. - Peter Drucker, The New Society of Organizations
Chances are, there are areas of your role that should now be automated, outsourced or sunsetted. There are higher value things you should focus your attention on.
Change is hard. If you see an opportunity to make a change, make it easy for your boss to say yes to change. Spend enough time understanding and explaining the problem at hand, potential solutions, and the business impact of those solutions. Write it down.
If you’re utilizing systems, automations, and processes to build a long-term business, you’re not trading time for money, but instead operating and profiting outside of the time you spend working and beyond your one-to-one relationships. - Paul Jarvis, Company of One
Your boss wants you to work smarter, not harder.
you aren't focused on your own growth
When you’re busy at work, you get stuck in the getting sh*t done cycle, continuing to be how you are without a line of sight to what is possible.
Hesitation to work smarter instead of harder is understandable.
The value you add by automating your job extends beyond the contribution you make on a daily basis to elevating the company infrastructure. The person that comes after you is setup to work more efficiently and effectively because of the work that you do.
Doing more may go against your economic interests, your intention to have a work/life balance in the here and now, and the quiet desire to just keep on keeping on. Changing how you work is invasive and terrifying. Doing a better job at work could mean getting more work or harder work or worse, putting yourself out of a job entirely.
Isn’t that kind of the point though?
Nobody at Carta does the same thing everyday. Everyone is working to put themselves out of a job. This is our “creative destruction” that drives us to evolve, grow, and adapt. - Carta 101 - Henry Ward, CEO/Founder
You have the unique opportunity to learn something new everyday at work, and to level yourself up through it.
Your goals have to grow with you. If your role is fixed without ongoing room or requirement for learning, innovation or growth, is it actually that purposeful to you and the company longterm?
This question sounds entitled. Purposeful work can feel like a pipe dream at best, and a luxury at worst. Assuming your basic needs are met though and remembering that it’s a job seekers market, when you go to work, do you see a ceiling or the sky?
In the big shift to creative, knowledge work, change is constant. Anything that can be done mindlessly will eventually be made redundant or automated. Work is transforming at such a pace that working mindfully and effectively is no longer a nice to have, it’s a need to have.
Peter Drucker predicted the shift in The New Society of Organizations in 1992:
It is safe to assume that anyone with any knowledge will have to acquire new knowledge every four or five years or become obsolete.
In the article, he highlights the Japanese principle of kaizen, the continuous improvement of working practices. “Innovate or die” and “it’s always day one” are applied in product development and process evolution, but the employee experience falls victim to cultural lag.
The delayed shifts in the workplace can make you think afraid to challenge the status quo. It is what it is; same sh*t, different day.
Most founders I’ve met started companies with insane drive, commitment, and the willingness to do whatever it takes to grow. That pace is unsustainable over the longterm so they find new ways to grow - vicariously through software and through others.
Growth requires you to figure out what’s important, work smart to get it done, and be meaningfully change agile.
Your boss wants you to grow.
you're disconnected from company results
Outside of jobs with fixed outcomes, hours spent at work generally don’t equal impact. I don’t say this to discredit hard work, rather to agree that we all spend too much of our workdays letting superfluous interruptions eat our brains.
Communication and visibility that help contribute to company culture are both essential and ephemeral.
Businesses are output driven entities. How do you maximize the value you’re able to contribute each hour of your day in a way that matters?
Your ability to contribute to the bottom line may be impacted by the constant interruptions of working in a shared space with other people. For some roles, working in a shared space is essential, for others, it robs productive time.
Three to four hours of continuous, undisturbed deep work each day is all it takes to see a transformational change in our productivity and our lives. - Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
The impact of the work should validate the input. If the quality and success of work is sh*tty, you will be challenged whether you work 40 or 80 hour weeks. If its stupendous and you can get it done working 6 hours a day while actively participating in growing your company, cool.
There’s a real possibility no, likelihood that you could get more done in less time.
Microsoft Japan’s experiments with a four-day week during the summer (which increased its productivity by 40 percent, according to the company).
Your boss wants you to contribute to the bottom line.
you don't love your job
Working superficially long hours and working as little as possible are symptoms of the same problem. You don’t love your job.
Job love is, perhaps, a fantasy. Work is a thing we all have to do, so get it done so that you can move onto living. This is the way the world works.
The way it worked, anyways.
Now, what I want from a job is pretty simple: to have the continuous opportunity to learn and grow, to help others, and to enjoy the people that I’m around. I want to love my life, so I want to love my job, too.
Without job love, you give minimal input and get minimal output; for your company and for yourself. Getting the core part of your job done is enough.
With job love, being able to fulfill your core responsibilities more efficiently and effectively lets you see the sky. To infinity and beyond.
The future of work isn’t crappy jobs. Work can be a place you go to contribute to the bottom line AND learn, f*ck up, experiment, try really hard, make friends, mentor, enjoy recess, and grow as a human being to make an impact on your community and the world at large.
When work is play, you intrinsically enjoy showing up and getting stuff done. This is what companies try to fake with ping pong tables and kegs in the office. The use that any fun stuff gets is directly related to how much your team members enjoy their job and each other; an hour long ping pong tournament is a lagging not a leading indicator of job love.
If you love your job, you stick out the insane weeks and frustration of failure to get good enough to grow yourself. With this mindset, what feels like work today may feel like play in a week, or in a year.
Your boss wants you to love your job.
they need you to tell them how you can get your best work done
There is a real possibility that your boss might be such a terrible person that they have no respect for your time, life or sanity. A company may be so broken that, despite your best efforts, the only real answer is to leave.
Some jobs call for inhuman stretches of time at work. Startups during a growth phase, consulting firms and investment banks always. The opportunity to contribute a ton means getting to learn a ton, too. You go in knowing you’ll only stay for 2-5 years.
All business is a choice about the life we want outside of it. - Paul Jarvis, Company of One
For other jobs, what’s most likely is that, up until this point:
you haven’t had an honest conversation with yourself about how you’re getting in your own way and/or
no one has had the earth shatteringly difficult direct conversation about boundaries and work life balance with your boss.
If you don’t ask for what you need, you won’t get it. Instead you’ll grow to hate your job and/or leave, and the cycle will continue for the people that come after you.
The ethos that the company was founded under doesn’t make sense once the company is huge, or as the team ages. Someone will have a baby and realize that hustling through 16 hour days is no longer feasible.
Just because the company started a certain way doesn’t mean it has to continue this way. What got you here will not get you there.
In a survey of 11,000 workers and 6,500 business leaders by Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group, the vast majority said that among the new developments most urgently affecting their businesses were employees’ expectations for flexible, autonomous work; better work-life balance; and remote working. (Just 30 percent, though, said their businesses were prepared.) - Young People Are Going to Save Us All From Office Life
The work culture depicted in movies often puts the interests of employees and employers at odds. Knowledge work is fundamentally reorienting this towards alignment.
Figuring out what’s important, working smarter, growing, contributing to the bottom line and loving your job are mutually beneficial tenets of the future of work.
Don’t work how everyone else works. Work in a way that works. Start today.
