This was so refreshing to read.
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I really struggle with this - I do get up at 5 am and start working (when I have kids who sleep through the night ā¦ ). I do answer emails during two am feedings, and at 8:15 pm when the kids are in bed and my husband is walking the dogs.
Long story short, not sure I can fix me, but I installed a browser extension so whoever Iām emailing it gets it at 8 or so.
I wish I knew the answer. In my field, itās en vogue for tenured profs to loudly declare they only work 40 hours a week, all the while not addressing what they did before they had tenure and if they cut their junior colleagues slack to do the same.
Do people still say āYou do youā? That might be the only good answer.
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Yeah, but are you having magazine articles written about you that breathlessly describe your success? I do similar-but-not-the-same things to keep up, but Fast Company isnāt calling me for a profile.
The article resonated with me because of things like:
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I used to have a boss who would walk the office floor at 5:30pm, checking who was at their desk, not taking into account he was invariably the last person to show up in the morning and that most of us started at 8am. I used to find an excuse to e-mail him about something right after I got to work ā not sure if he took the hint, but he never hassled me about my hours.
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A friend of mine had a boss who spent most of her day talking about what long hours she worked. The boss would get annoyed if people left āearlyā. My friend is the sort who shows up at 8am, works until noon, eats the sandwich she brought with her at her desk, works until 4-4:30 and goes home, all caught up on her work and then some.
Basically, there are some chaotic types out there who get really annoyed when they arenāt slavishly copied.
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I hate those tropes about successful people, too.
Successful people tend to be really into their work because they really enjoy it and have a freedom and power over their work that few others do. So, yeah, they wake up at 5 am and shoot off emails because every day is a new creative adventure that can swing the stock market or bring in new business or create opportunities to travel and speak and be influential.
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Yes! I saw a video once of Richard Branson, and he was talking about how he would just wake up with an idea in the morning, and within days it had happened! And all I could think was, his poor reports, never knowing what was going to land in their inbox next.
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I worked at a startup company that was on its way up. We had an inventive founder who was fond of giving tours of the plant to perspective vendors and customers. During these tours, he would cook up all kinds of new inventions. We never knew how to tell the listeners that none of these things existed or were even being considered before the walk-thru and that there was no way any of that was going to happen given the current work load.
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Oh, totally. I tend to think of this sort of habit-porn in the way I think of āfitspirationā or whatever. Mimicing someone elseās habits is unlikely to get you the same results. I try to find ways to avoid visiting the rigor of my schedule on my employees. Scheduling emails, quantifying the amount of work a task will take before asking for volunteers, etc.
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Three things that effective leads do:
- Educate
- Delegate
- Advocate
An empowered report is an effective report. Every effective boss Iāve worked with spent years as frontline staff. They knew how to work efficiently, trained and cross-trained their minions, and didnāt micro.
My favourite bosses also compensated handsomely, both in money, perks, and respect.
Want to be successful? Be born rich. Want to be effective? Educate, Delegate, Advocate.
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I have taken the tactic now when people go into the whole, āI worked 80 hours last weekā¦ā spiel, I immediately fire back with āThat is terrible! What do we need to do to fix that!ā
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Thank you.
When I was taking project management courses, they showed us studies going right back to the post-war period, up to the present day. Anyone working 80h a week ā any kind of work ā is only being something like 65% efficient. And no doubt theyāre too tired and frazzled to realise that.
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The whole thing over that is exploding right now, thanks to Rockstar.
I am glad that you know what the right response is. Unfortunately, too many managers donāt (or are warned away from it).
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I know I need to take my own advice, but I donāt expect stupid hours to be worked to maintain the business.
The nature of the job means there is some off hour work. Fine. I figure you can take it out of the 40ish you owe the company this week.
Major project go-lives, well, maybe Iāll need you to put in some long hours for a week or so. I also expect you to remember I donāt care if you take a couple hours for lunch sometimes.
Iāve grown my team from Me + 1 to Me + 5 in 18 months because I will not stand back and see people ground into the dirt over a paycheck.
Burnout is a huge killer in this industry. Figuratively and literally. I donāt want or need super-heroes. I want competent professionals that continue to show up and be productive.
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I have got thiiiiiiis close to putting a āno superheroesā sign up in my cube a few times (before self preservation kicked in).
Thereās the burnout mind of superheroes you mentioned.
Then thereās the kind who donāt share info. That way they can swoop in to save the day when someone higher-up is watching. I had one former colleague sit on info I needed (despite my reminding her) for three weeks ā until she could loudly announce she was providing me with it when the VP was within earshot.
Then there are the superheroes who swoop in to save the day ā when theyāre the ones who caused the crisis in the first place by not mitigating risk properly. Meanwhile, the ones who make contingencies donāt get noticed because they never have a crisis to be a hero in.
Fuck superheroes.
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Not just the work, but all the other stuff too. They can delegate away almost all the friction that normal people have to deal with. They donāt have to wait for the landlord to show up with a plumber to fix the water heater. If their kidās sick, grandpa needs a ride home from the eyedoctor, etc., they can just have their people deal with it. Car broken down? They donāt have to get it to the shop, get a loaner, stop by the bank to get a loan to get it fixed. They can just drive the Porsche instead and tell their people to get the BMW fixed. They can put not just more time, but more mental energy into work because everything else is handled for them.
Thank you for that! My boss seems to have the same attitude. After many years of pressure the other way, (including a burnout at a previous job that landed me in a series of doctors offices) Iāve had to reign myself back a bit and remind myself of that. Iām now able to make myself say āI can look at that later or tomorrow, but I have to go to dinner now.ā or ask someone else to take over.
There are so many people who donāt understand how counterproductive (literally) overwork and burnout is. Overwork and pressure on tight deadlines are almost certainly responsible for the majority of software bugs and āemergency incidentsā. Sure, there are bad developers, miscommunications, honest mistakes, etc. But most and especially the worst are from pressure and mental fatigue.
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My favorite are the people who are only really effective at selling their brand of effectiveness. What truly effective, successful person would ever even consider bothering to write a lifestyle e-newsletter promoting their effective habits? Itās all coming from the āIf you canāt do, teachā school, which with the reach of the internet can be really lucrative.
As a counterpoint, though, I am a horribly inefficient worker, with objectively bad work habits and a lot of procrastination. I am also highly effective if/when I set my mind to it, but that is a small fraction of the time. With better habits, I would inarguably be way more effective and successful (particularly with the freelance work I do). So I totally understand the draw of this kind of stuff.
But I know that my bad habits are personal, with my own specific causes. I think what would be interesting would be to dig way deeper into the āeffective habitsā - learning the reason behind each habit (the habit having been developed as a solution to a problem) would be illuminating.
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I was a bit like at work that but I learned that the latter outweighed the former. Perhaps you could see if itās true for you.
People work in different styles. It could be that while you were procrastinating, your subconscious was actually working on the problem, so that you could be highly effective when you got around to it.
My wife worries about playing solitaire while working, but sheās really de-stressing and thinking about how to solve problems.
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There are still just 24 hours a day. The virtue signalling productivity of going past 5 or 6 productive hours is used up by the diminishing returns. For an executive, there is a certain monopoly value in working those 5 or 6 hours and then being in everyoneās shit for another 5 or 6 hours. They only have to apply themselves to this scam for a while until they reach the end goal: making people believe that threatening to be in their shit is the whole of their bossās job.
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That is definitely true for me too, and I never miss a deadline or anything. But I know that I could be doing twice as much work as I do while still having plenty of subconscious-working time.
Itās tough because the additional work I could be doing is completely optional - itād be to expand my freelance business. Itās stuff I enjoy doing so the goal of doing it full-time (or, ideally, half-time with a full-time income) is very attractive, but because I donāt have to do it, I donāt do enough. Itās also creative work, though, so a lot of it canāt be forced, but realistically a lot of it can.
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This is also me.
When I have something interesting to do, I will work right through my lunch and other breaks, because the actual functional part of my job is a lot of fun.
However, a lot of the work is make-work: sending stuff along to three different people to sign off; write-only documentation and reports that will never get looked at; trying to figure out exactly what percentage of the work for this particular project has been completed at this particular moment.
For instance.
The last time I took an extended (week-long) vacation, they came to me with a request of āHow do we fix X system if it goes down?ā I wrote a ten-page illustrated document of how and where to check what brought the system down, the most common things that would bring it down and how to resolve them so that the system could be brought up, and how to bring the system up again and notify the appropriate people to correct any errors caused by the system going down.
A month later, I get into work, and people are panicking because the system has gone down, and theyāre asking me to investigate, because surely this is a problem with the recent changes that have gone in. I follow exactly the same process I had documented - and it was one of the problems I had gone into great detail of showing how to diagnose and restore service (to the point where I made a note that āif this part of the system ever goes down, itās probably for this exact reasonā).
I spend my time writing the documentation they ask me to, and the moment it would be most useful, they donāt use it, but wait for me to come in instead. Write-only documentation. I canāt stand it.
If they handed me off more work-work to do, I would get it done in a trice, and Iād be happier for being busy with it. I got a particularly interesting task today, that took a whole day of being alternately triumphant and frustrated, and I plugged away at it until it was done. But I know that if I ask for more to do, theyāll assign me more of the bureaucratic stuff and not more of the stuff that will keep my brain engaged.
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Ah, yes.
At my work, there exists the āKnowledge Baseā (hereafter KB)
In concept - a great idea; in practice - terrible.
The interface is overly cumbersome, such that to use it natively with embedded images and helpful formatting and tables is a foolās errand.
So, I end up doing the write up in word and attaching the document. Now it is much less easy to use because once you find the article, you need to open the document.
When you do click on an article, itās a pop-up window. From the KB page, there is no option to get a direct link. So if you are trying to help people use the KB and send them the article link, you canāt easily. BUT, if you select the āEmail Articleā, you can email them a direct link. Oh, and the KB canāt look up emails in the company directory becauseā¦ damned if I know. The authentication to the KB is tied to your AD identity.
Thereās this helpful feature that articles can expire (so that workaround you documented 15 months ago, but have since fixed properly doesnāt show up) But, everything expires and no one has the time to go back in and unexpire them because the interface is so cruel. I asked can we just flag articles that are old and push them lower in the search results? Great Idea, maybe next upgrade (that will never happen to this system)
So, at the end of the day, documentation stays siloed in particular groups and through tribal knowledge.
The Next Big ITSM Project is going to solve ALL THESE ISSUES thoughā¦just you wait. (That was supposed to have been live 6 months ago and currently is T.B.D.)
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@nimelennar You must have struck a nerve.
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