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CHAPTER 1
THE ROAD TO BURNOUT
Recently a radio commercial aired for a popular brand of wireless PDA. The first voice, the owner of the device, tells how he was able to get all of Mondayâs work done on the train ride in. He checked his email, reviewed his PowerPoint presentation, read some documents, all kinds of great stuff. âSo what happens when you get to work?â asks a second voice. âI pretend itâs Tuesday,â he replies, and the commercial ends.
The character in this ad is typical of many people that I have met in the business world: people who are dedicated, enthusiastic, and optimistic about their work and their career prospects. They work diligently, always alert and responsive to incoming requests for their attention and time. Their technologies allow them to compose documents, messages, and presentations much faster than just a few years ago, and the ease by which information is sent across time zones and between departments means that turnaround times are shorter, and everyone stays busy. Very busy. Yet, below the surface, these same people feel something else: a nagging sensation that speed and overload is getting the better of them. They sense a certain frustration. Their workload seems to grow all the time. There is an expectation that responses to emails and requests should be given immediately, and this occupies much of the working day. The true number of hours needed to get it all done extends into the evening and the weekend. Distraction seems to overtake focus. The stress and confusion that this causes tends to make these people feel they have to work more, just to keep up.
This is the world of speed. In principle, it makes sense. If you can do more, you advance. But the problem with speed is that is generates busy-ness as opposed to business. It brings into being a frenetic level of activity that blinds the observer as to actual progress and productivity. The constant need to âkeep upâ leads to a false sense of achievement, so that while we think we are swimming, we are actually just treading water.
This condition is not unique to the digital age. It has been part of organized work for many centuries, but it has truly taken a great leap forward in the last decades. It can be put into strong perspective by observing it in the light of three simple concepts, as follows:
1. PARKINSONâS LAW
Cecil Northcote Parkinson was an engineer who, in the 1950s, made a scientific study of staffing and labor in the British civil service, in which he described how the value of a departmentâs output declined as the number of employees increased. He published his findings in a book called Parkinsonâs Law: The Pursuit of Progress. Today, Parkinsonâs Law is often stated as, âWork expands to fill the time available,â or in terms of computers and computing, âData expands to fill the space available for storage.â In either case, the expression reflects a type of ergonomic inflation, in which scope increases, yet true productivity does not.
Were he still alive today, Cecil Parkinson would surely have enjoyed observing the way in which his law has flourished. Imagine, for example, how the rest of the day unfolds for the wireless PDA owner in the radio commercial described at the start of this chapter. He arrives at his desk having completed Mondayâs work on the train. His schedule, having been momentarily freed up, quickly refills with more tasks and more expectations. He now has just as much work to do as he would have if he had spent the train trip staring out the window. Itâs different work, but itâs still just as much. So he canât really pretend itâs Tuesday, because a second Monday has slipped in to fill the void. Is the new work that he takes on âhigh value work,â or just âworkâ? Is he taking twice as long to work on his next project simply because time has been freed up due to his diligence on the train? Most importantly, can he tell the difference between work and productivity?
There are a great many busy people who will declare that thereâs nothing wrong with having two Mondays in a week. After all, thatâs where opportunity lies: âThe early bird gets the worm,â they say. But when using bird analogies, surely the size and type of worms youâre after must count for something. People who remain preoccupied by incessant incoming messages and additional tasks face the danger of only ever noticing the smaller worms, while the larger ones go unnoticed, to say nothing of cats and other dangers that may also lurk nearby. When work expands to fill the time available, quality and value do not necessarily follow suit.
The neat thing about Parkinsonâs law, though, is that it swings both ways. Anyone whoâs ever had to write a term paper for school or put together a PowerPoint presentation for work knows that it usually takes right up until the drop-dead deadline to get it done, and often this means working into the late hours of the evening. But the shifting of a projectâs timelines can also happen in reverse. A person, for example, who decides to spring clean his house, might find it will take all weekend, unless he receives a surprise phone call from his mother-in-law, announcing her arrival in 45 minutes. Then, the spring cleaning will take 45 minutes. The energy allotment of a project tends to bend according to the observerâs perception of the projectâs value.
This skewed awareness of time and work is truly quite mystical. It defines humans as unique, for although other animals are aware of time in the sense of when itâs time to migrate south, when itâs time to hibernate, or when itâs time to sleep, these responses are governed more by internal sensations such as hunger, fatigue, and instinct. Weâre the only creatures that regularly troll through personal timekeeping systems, afraid equally of deadlines and empty spaces.
At the end of the day the busy person in the radio commercial will go back home on his train, and as efficient as he was in completing all of his work on the way in, the commute home will find him working on all those additional tasks that he was not able to finish during his busy workday.
2. THE PAPER CUP IN THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE
The second of our three principles comes out of the research put forth by a scientist and writer by the name of Temple Grandin. Dr. Grandin designs slaughterhouses, and she is also, by her own admission, autistic. She works with some of the nationâs largest food processing companies to design abattoirs that allow animals to follow a herding instinct, rather than simply be forced to their end. Though it may seem a moot point to some, she has demonstrated and proven many economic, humane, and consumer-related health benefits to having animals avoid the stress of entrapment in unfamiliar surroundings during this difficult and final chapter of their short lives.
Dr. Grandinâs autism gives her an advantage, she states, since it confers upon her the unique ability to visualize how animals process information, and by contrast, how humans do. When surveying an area in which to walk or graze, she says, an animalâs attention will be inevitably drawn to any unique or unusual item or visual cue in its visual field. This item will take on a disproportionate significance in the animalâs mind and will greatly impact its decision or desire to continue moving in that direction. For example, she teaches slaughterhouse employees to stay on the lookout for litter, since stray items such as a paper coffee cup lying innocuously on the floor, an item that would go unnoticed by the workers themselves, turns into a strange object of focus and fear for an already stressed cow. The cup becomes an obstacle, an irregular object, something that causes the animal to want to turn away in panic. This, she says, is also how many autistic people perceive things. They take intense interest in small singular objects, to the exclusion of all else.
The reason this is important to us in the high-speed working world is that, through the lens of her own autism, Dr. Grandin is able to tell us a lot about ourselvesâthe non-autistic, time-pressed working masses. She describes how non-autistic people take in information: âLike a lamp store,â she says. âEverything is on, all the time, and itâs all taken in.â1 This metaphor speaks volumes about the challenge that 21st-century knowledge workers face, due to their internal wiring. For us, everything is on all the time. New stimuli, such as email, phone calls, and text messages arrive constantly and are immediately accepted as additional important elements of the day. Each of these interruptions or messages represents another lamp being lit inside the lamp store, illuminating itself inside an already brilliant cluster of lights.
We non-autistic humans are better able to handle this, we feel, because it is part of an overall multidimensional awareness machine that is controlled by the brain. Along with binocular vision, acute binaural hearing, a highly reactive sense of touch, and more deeply and mysteriously, instinct and intuition, these attributes have kept human beings alive and evolving for hundreds of thousands of years. But just as we can never see the forest when surrounded by trees, it takes the perspective of an autistic person, someone who does not share such a capacity for multiple inputs, to truly see that our predilection for a constant inflow of stimuli comes from within. Itâs all speed and brightness. We demand it and expect it of ourselves. But that doesnât mean weâre entirely good at it.
Now, there are many who would ask, so whatâs wrong with speed, light, and multiple stimuli? After all, the pace, scope, and breadth of business has increased. The bright lamp store of human perception, they argue, is the hallmark of a multitasking environment, and itâs up to the individual to keep up or get out. And that might be an appropriate assessment if the human body and brain were able to evolve faster, but as it is, with our body design still better attuned to finding and eating raw foods in the wild than snacks from a vending machine, there is only so much that can be pulled, both from muscles and synapses, before things give way. Every light bulb eventually burns out.
3. THE LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS
People who understand the rudiments of economics and business will know about the law of diminishing returns, the third in my list of three founding principles, and one that states that by adding more resources to a situation, there comes a time when productivity peaks and then declines. Simply continuing to add more and more resources doesnât necessarily produce consistently bigger and better returns, in just the same fashion as working more and more hours doesnât yield consistently high quality. There comes a point at which you just canât do anymore, you canât pull any more out of the day, whether you want to or not.
Yet the economists and MBAs who know all this are among those who fire up their laptops and PDAs on the train ride home, satisfying themselves that in getting one more task out of the way they can get back to the family and finally relax. They will argue that doing work on the train is an act of liberation that allows them to actually leave the office and get home in time for supper.
WHAT THESE THREE FUNDAMENTALS MEAN TO US
Parkinsonâs Law shows that people work on the train because they have the time to work on the train. They have allowed their working day to expand to include the hour or two so spent commuting. When people know, even subconsciously or reluctantly, that theyâll be able to catch up on the train, they then allow more work to fill up the rest of the day. They may not think theyâre allowing itâthey may feel instead that itâs being forced upon them by outside powers. But thatâs precisely the point. Working at continual high speed with no opportunity for cooling down, they have lost a great part of themselves. They have lost the ability to set limits and negotiate around these limits. They have lost the skills needed to prioritize tasks and to say no to excessive workloads. They have lost the ability to assign realistic durations to tasks, and realistic volumes to workdays and workweeks, and they have lost the ability to educate the people they work for and to manage expectations constructively. The cushion of time that the train ride represents now becomes a solid fixture: just another hour or two in an expanded workday. When put in terms of human physiology, itâs on par with noticing that your waistline is expanding and then solving the problem by buying bigger pants.
Itâs natural, of course, to feel justified in overworking the way we do. Thatâs what Dr. Grandinâs lamp store analogy shows us. We are wired to expect and demand multiple sources of stimulation, constantly. But as more and more of these tasks and messages insinuate themselves into the hours before 9:00 a.m. and after 6:00 p.m., there comes a point where clear, creative productive thought gets obscured for the entire day. The Law of Diminishing Returns sets in. Does an 80-hour work week truly yield 80 hours of productive work? Can anyone really be âonâ for 80 hours? Is it a matter of taking 80 hours to get done what could be achieved in 60 or 40 hours were it not for the distractions of the workplace or the fatigue and overload you are experiencing? Or is it that you work for someone who expects 80 hours of dedication per weekâsomeone with whom you ...
