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The Work Ethic Teeter-Totter
I'm the fat kid.
For as long as I can remember I’ve always thought I had a work ethic problem.
Part of that belief is justified. I skated through grade school and then actually had zero work ethic in university.
I didn’t last long there.
Now, even though I have achieved a significant amount both personally and professionally, that idea still lingers in the back of my mind.
“What if you still aren’t doing enough to be successful, reach your potential or live without regrets?”
There is a passage in Matthew Hussey’s new book that explains this phenomenon:
I struggle to believe I'm worthy of moments of joy and peace without first putting myself through a brutal schedule. Monitoring my productivity levels down to the minute. Perhaps some people apply this earn your cookie mindset in ways that lead to healthy achievements not me. Mine is a mutation whereby joy and self-compassion are regularly outlawed by an internal tyrant who decides when I've been flogged enough for one day. Just when I'm about to collapse a voice inside says, “Okay give him half an hour of peace before bed but make sure he knows we'll start again bright and early in the morning.”
While my inner monologue isn’t that much of a tyrant, it makes me feel the deep-seeded pain of an unproductive day.
Enough that I have almost no unproductive days. I’ve even managed to turn vacation days into days that require productivity.
For the better part of the last decade it never made sense to me why someone would come home at the end of the day and just watch Netflix or play video games.
I’ve always had to have an outlet that made my leisure time have forward momentum. To atone for my lack of work ethic…
As if someone was going to come crashing through my front door and find out that I secretly slacked off in my free time.
Oliver Burkeman calls this Productivity Debt:
People (by which I meant me) seem to feel as if they start off each morning in a kind of "productivity debt", which they must struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes. Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I'm falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output. It's as if I need to justify my existence, by staying "on top of things", in order to stave off some ill-defined catastrophe that might otherwise come crashing down upon my head.
We talked last week about the importance of time as a primary resource. As I’ve reflected over the last three weeks this has become extra evident.
Reflecting on my future lack of “free” time I can understand why some people choose to rebalance their leisure time strictly for decompression.
A fulfilling, or at least entertaining job and a healthy family life is enough.
There isn’t a productivity demon to exorcise daily…
Or a lingering sense of needing to prove the world wrong…
Or an ever-present feeling of not working hard enough to reach your potential.
As if it is even possible to reach something that ephemeral.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t still be writing these newsletters if I didn’t enjoy the process. But, part of me wonders if there isn’t a better way to lean in to, as Greg Mckeown would call it, a more Effortless way of doing things.
Not flogging myself on the altar of productivity and doing work for the sake of doing work.
I called it a work ethic teeter-totter because it’s near impossible to balance.
I likely never will…
But, I should at least do my best to lose a couple of cognitive pounds so there isn’t a metaphorical fat kid of productivity sitting on one side.
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