When you are passionate about your work, it can easily bleed into every other area of your life — you read about work-related topics in your free time, you think about a particularly challenging problem in the shower, you journal about your work, etc. It also changes ones social circle: hanging out with an ambitious and curious start-up crowd easily leads to work as the default topic in a gathering of friends. Once you have work deeply embedded in your interests and social life, it does not take a huge mental leap to "work is what defines me as an individual".
That then leads to a precarious "all eggs in one basket" situation that leaves you vulnerable in cases of professional failure ("My start-up is not doing well; I am a failure") or burnout ("I'm cynical about my work; nothing matters").
It took quite a bit of time to disentangle my self-worth and my professional identity, but it makes life so much better.
A related issue is that many technical people mistake a passion for their craft with a passion for their work.
For example, I am very passionate about statistics, I spend a tremendous amount of my free time studying it. I also work as a data scientist. For far too long I mistook a passion for statistics as a passion for data science. I know many software engineers make a similar mistake regarding their passion for programming.
This is a surprisingly big issue in my experience because commitment to your craft can lead to friction with your work and vice versa. This is not a problem when you realize these are two distinct things, but can lead to problems if you aren't aware of this difference.
The most obvious one is that confusing work for craft means you can put more energy into your employer's goals than ones related to bettering your craft (and also yourself). For a software engineer, at first, a late night coding session can benefit both. However in the long run if you keep spending time solving your employers problems, you will have less energy to study and practice software for it's own sake. This can also lead to burn out in which you start to lose you passion for your craft as well.
The reverse of this is also true: being very good at your craft can hurt you professionally. Your employer doesn't care about good code, or the correct statistical models. In the past, whenever I saw fundamentally incorrect statistical tools being used in production at work I couldn't stop and try to correct it. I've seen many software engineers struggle similarly when orgs make bad technical decisions.
I failed many interviews because the interviewer had a mistaken view of things, and rather than just play along, I would try to correct them (I've learned that no matter how sincere and kind you are in your correction, it is always a mistake to correct an interviewer). I distinctly remember the first time an interviewer incorrectly "corrected" me, and instead of justifying my decision, I just said "wow you're right, I was just sketching out some ideas here, but that path is worth investigating". Got that job very easily.
Eventually I realized that I am passionate about statistics and mathematical modeling, these are related but ultimately tangential to my day job. It's great that I get paid well to do something closely related to what I love to study, but at the end of the day it's no different than a true coffee lover working at starbucks.
It funny you mentioned the interview thing. I interviewed at Google with someone who obviously has the wrong mental model of how multi-threading worked at the OS and hardware level and I got into that exact situation. I could tell they were annoyed and I realized my miscue immediately. Didn't get that job even when the rest of the day long interview went very well.
An interesting distinction. I think I've somehow found subconscious ways to keep these aligned. I suspect that my craft is finding creative technical/programming solutions to semi-well-defined problems so that intersects with work. If there's a lack of such problems and learning opportunities, I'd look elsewhere. I'll be thinking about this more from now on and seeing how I can do things differently. I should at least be able to identify some cases where I don't like the feeling of something then learn why.
This is such a great distinction! The reason people are encouraged not to make their work their life is that their work can be taken away from them (including for reasons that are in no way their fault). But a passion for your craft can transcend your day-to-day work.
> but at the end of the day it's no different than a true coffee lover working at starbucks.
starbucks would be horrible for a true coffee lover. starbucks serves more "coffee flavored drinks" than real coffee.
Now that same coffee lover working at a high end coffee place where they can perfect the art of the pourover and refine their pull on the espresso machine.. that might be heaven for them.
You could say the same about falling in love with someone, it's great, you can get caught up in it, and you're really vulnerable in case the relationship fails.
The analogy here would be to not cut out all your other social relationships just because you have a romantic partner. Make time for your family and friends.
Depends on how much success you have with the SaaS, perhaps it changes your life enough to be a world-changing event. Some people fall in love multiple times, not many can say the same about making a ground breaking SaaS.
Tongue firmly in cheek, in case people don't get what I'm saying.
> "do not get invested that much that you loose everything including yourself if it fails"
That's great advice if you're 18 years old; but some things are worth the risk.
If you're not all in, you're not in at all. While this certainly applies to work in some cases, it applies as much as again if you want to start a family.
Modern relationships are a hell because everyone has their eye on the door at all times - ready to bolt at a moment's notice if something goes wrong, or if something better comes along.
You'll never have a family of your own with that mindset; it's a problem that causes itself.
Seems like black and white thinking. There's a big spectrum between those two extremes, and no good reason you can't healthily occupy a point on that spectrum. In fact, many points on that spectrum are probably a lot more healthy than either extreme.
Well, you have managed to have pretty long career as a DJ. I don't know if anyone can be so influential in software development as you were with House music ;)
I don’t think so. When you look at the historical record. Work either in the modern or agricultural sense has only existed for at most 5% of human existence.
Dividing things into intrinsically human and not is a false dichotomy. Our experience is always a mix of what comes from our biology and what comes from culture. Finding enjoyment in a craft or a puzzle may well have existed for thousands of years. And relationships are definitely effected by culture. The expectations around marriage for example have changed a lot.
I'd still consider hunting/gathering a form of work. And who knows, maybe the disposition for individuals to hyperfocus on that form of work led to more genetic success and desirability for reproduction, since it meant there would be more security of resources. I have no idea if these tendencies have a genetic component, totally spitballing here.
> That then leads to a precarious "all eggs in one basket" situation that leaves you vulnerable in cases of professional failure ("My start-up is not doing well; I am a failure") or burnout ("I'm cynical about my work; nothing matters").
I have such an annoyingly hard time with this. From a simple "couldn't achieve a technical goal I set for myself for the day" on a Friday afternoon ruining my Friday night and, through ripple effects, subsequently the rest of the weekend to I'm unfulfilled in my job therefore I'm worthless.
> Once you have work deeply embedded in your interests and social life, it does not take a huge mental leap to "work is what defines me as an individual".
No, you are confusing cause and effect around emotional attachment and passion/effort.
People are equally likely to attach their sense of self-worth to aspects that require zero effort: nationality, favorite sport team, family name...
Putting a lot of effort into something is not the cause for attachment, but sometimes it can be the effect.
My challenge with this is that I feel I am not good enough, so I make the extra effort (e.g in my personal time) to show up and be better. The problem is I've been burnt by this in the past and I see it happening again to myself. There's a few things I've done differently to prevent burn out, but anytime I pause, my inner critic catches up and works to remind me how incompetent I am relative to everyone else.
Your inner critic can be shaped to what you need it to be. First, I'd change, I'm not good enough, to I want to get better at X. Seems like semantics, but perspective is everything. When possible, frame things in the positive (hit the ball, rather than DON'T miss).
When you do this, I think it will be easier to convince your inner critic that you need rest (not just sleep but time to pause, other activities for your brain/body, etc.). Whatever balance is for you, you can train your inner critic to prioritize that over a cruel checklist.
Also, I think it's unhelpful to describe yourself as incompetent relative to everyone else or not. If you are behind some others, there are reasons (most probably related to experience), and if you understand them, I think you should be at peace with where you are. That doesn't mean stop improving. It just means, I am here; to get to Z, I must do X and Y.
Basically, zoom in and out of your situation enough to understand it, and do the best thing for you. It could be helpful to frame it as though you are setting up the parameters for a friend rather than yourself. A lot of people aren't as kind to themselves as they are to people they care about. Care about you; be kind to you.
I think you’re forgetting natural talent (it is their Acceleration to your velocity), commitment, energy, lack of distractions, luck and so many other things you can’t account for. Feeling left behind is inevitable even if you’re on the top of one field - there are going to be others you’re not at the forefront of. The billionaires pay a ton of money to play tennis/golf for example - ask them how they feel when they watch pga/open events.
The crux of the answer is making peace with getting left behind and constructing meaning where you’re. Or use that as motivation. In a connected world the Jones are way too many in number to match and exceed.
I think we as humans need to and will find the ability to have a thick skin for this. We have had to historically build resistance to various distractions - this is just the latest where all the celebs are very interested in making you feel like they are regular humans as well and what they do is very much achievable for everyone: in short it isn’t and we just need to get with the program.
These patterns of automatic thoughts ("how incompetent I am relative to everyone else") are a pain to overcome, especially, if there is no alternative avenue for self-worth (e.g. I am a good partner / friend / child / parent / citizen).
It's also quite surprising to note how easy these thought patterns emerge from seemingly nothing. The bar we evaluate ourselves against is often quite removed from rational thought — we can easily place this at an arbitrarily high point just out of reach ("OK, my start-up is growing; it doesn't matter, it needs to be grow faster!").
Good on you for reflecting and picking up these thought patterns!
You’re probably not good enough at a lot of things (this is true of nearly everyone), so why do you make the extra effort to get good at work? How do you know you’re not good enough? Are you getting fired over and over?
I definitely experienced this. The problem for me was that in addition it made it harder to deal with tough feedback as self worth is connected to the work.
There's a big difference between "professionalism can be part of your self-worth" and "your work is the only source of your self-worth". Second part may be unhealthy - though, frankly, we probably would miss a lot of inventions and scientific discoveries if not for people that lived for their work - but the former is completely normal. "Untangle" is such a bad word to describe it - there's nothing wrong with your work being part of who you are, being tangled into it - provided there are other threads in that tangle.
I think it's important to distinguish between work and career. I do as well disentangle myself from work/job. My career, though, is another story. I love programming and I do it in my free time. At work, I couldn't care less whether I have to write Go, Java, Python or if I have to fix broken yaml files. I work for (good) money, I don't care if the company I work for succeeds or not. My career is timeless and it will accompany me until my last day.
Do you have any tips on how to go about this disentanglement? I spent the last 15 years focused solely on work. After a re-org I’m left on a team responsible for work I hate and want no part of. I find myself rather lost, but with the current economic situation I do like the stability of the job.
This starts from the hidden assumption that all work sucks. Basically, if you become passionate about your work, you will necessarily burn out, because work is awful for everyone all the time everywhere. It's a little like saying you should work really really hard to not be too into your romantic partner, because every human being on the planet is an abusive asshole.
Clearly not every human being is an abusive asshole; it's wonderful to be really extremely deeply invested in your romantic partner! But unfortunately we can't really say the same thing about work environments.
What you're actually doing here is excusing shitty work environments. If all jobs are abusive to their employers, we need to fix that, and quickly. There is nothing more satisfying in life than being passionate about your work, and the fact that it is virtually impossible to do so without eventually feeling like a battered abuse victim is a symptom of a late-stage cancerous regulatory-captured capitalism run by a caste of psychopaths.
I want to be passionate and invested in my work. Can we work together to make that a good thing, rather than being something only stupid loser suckers do?
It's unfortunate that the entire article is focused on toxic productivity as a feature of individuals, as though their personal/psychological shortcomings are to blame.
I think it is worthwhile asking what are the cultural, structural, workplace conditions which contribute to people feeling like this in the first place. Are people more likely to have 'toxic productivity' when they are having unrealistic deadlines/workloads thrown at them? Does management foster a hypercompetitive environment? Does being tethered to Slack/Teams contribute? Do specific workplace methodologies such as Agile, etc have an effect?
So we're just rehashing workaholism with a modern spin? We really are just living through a cycle that endlessly repeats. I've started reading books and listening to interviews done in the early 1980s and I've been astounded as to how the culture at the time was almost identical to what we're doing now. It's down right creepy but when I think about it it's not unexpected. From my point of view, that's exactly 1 generation. My peers and I have no memories of the period and so it makes sense that we haven't learned any of the lessons from that time. Thus we're doomed to repeat them now that we are the ones dominating the economy and the culture. It makes me wish for a more thorough survey of modern history to be taught in schools, I'm sure that with enough research you could identify significant trends that repeat on a regular basis which you could then teach to students so that they had some warning of what was to come and could perhaps break out of the cycle.
The cycle you’re referencing goes back way past the 80s. Consider where the phrase “burning the candle on both ends” comes from. Epictetus (an Ancient Greek philosopher) often talked about this subject. Etc.
It’s not a “cycle” to be avoided with better schooling, but rather just the persistent, ever present human condition that we must all learn to manage individually.
I don't think workaholism is an issue so ubiquitous that it could be considered a human condition to deal with. It's certainly existed for an undoubtedly long time, as you point out ("burning the midnight oil" was another more recent reference). It may even be a survival trait that developed for some: persistence and effort, not giving up, focus, etc.
In the modern human experience most people realize they don't or shouldn't have to run constantly just to survive. They understand how societies function and that if everyone puts in a little effort we'll all get growth and returns.
Modern workaholism in my opinion stems from market factors driven by capitalism and governmental policy. People have to hustle to survive more and more, we've began stripping off the protections societies have and replacing darwinistic survival of the fittest with a human social abstraction of survival of the fittest in economics. You need to make sure you succeed in the market to provide food, shelter, so on, otherwise you will starve or falter to poor health. You may be out on the streets living in a box. You'll still have some protections over living in a jungle alone, you're less likely to be eaten by a tiger or mountain lion but your overall longevity will be lower relative to economic success on average.
So the captains of industry, those who hold the purse strings, those who shape the culture and expectations are forcibly creating these sorts of obsessions through various private policies in terms of employment. You need to reach certain goals, you only take so many days off, you need to exceed your peers, you need to "grow" (become more efficient, pull in more revenue relative to your cost), and so on.
These environments shape a lot of workaholics you see now, in my opinion. They do it because to succeed in life they need to. To do the things they want to do, those are the rules they must play by. To supply their families, they pick up a second job, they sacrifice their evenings with their families to get a little ahead so maybe they'll be promoted or get a raise to meet up with inflation or in some cases, just so they're not the one on the chopping board when cuts come to provide stability.
Do this stuff long enough and it becomes embedded in your personal expectations and behaviors: you begin to be shaped by your environment. That's why we see so much deep focus on work. It's all driven by economic expectations and more so those who want to see their wealth magically transformed into more wealth passively.
It's not everyone, there are those completely driven and obsessed with goals aligned to workaholism but I don't think it's ubiquitous, most people set realistic goals for themselves and just want to have a happy living experience not extravagence and exceptionalism. I think those who have these obsessions are the ones who shape the culture from the top down due to a selection bias in our economic system (although.. due to pigeonhole principle, only so many of them are at the complete top--many need to live with less powerful positions).
This is not some crazy argument for socialism or to promote laziness, I think it's an overall good idea that people have some drive to be some measure of productive, it's instead an argument that capitalism has gone to extremes in efficiency and growth expectations and trimmed too much fat off the labor force to try and meet those expectations that labor is slowly starving. We need to reign expectations back down to something sane.
> 20hrs/day people just fucking crush the folks who kayak on the weekend.
I think the point is to let go of that measuring stick. If you measure them by how satisfied they are with their lives, kayakers are the ones crushing it. Being the best at something and the extreme work that requires does not necessarily make a better life than just walking your own path at a pace that works for you.
Neither should that diminish anyone who truly does want a life where they push to the extreme to be the best. If that works for them, great. But that is not for everyone.
I said nothing demeaning about life satisfaction or mental health or work/life balance as goals. People who emphasize life satisfaction are almost definitionally living a “better” life in some sense.
I am rather impatient, as you can likely tell, with people’s endless efforts to conflate that with elite technical ability, either individually or in a team.
I ground it out over decades with no education and for at least one of those decades, no mentorship.
I’m not advising anyone to take that path, but I’ll always get grumpy if someone triple equals that with learning some scripting language and being good at GitHub.
Very true, but it can be difficult to manage in team environment.
It's frustrating when a "this is my life" person relies on a "this is my job" person and the latter is too busy planning their next kayak trip to carry their pack. It would be the equivalent of the former constantly poking holes in the latter's kayak.
Don't mix up "enjoys work life balance and has evening and weekend plans" with "slacks off at work and drops the ball" though, they really are not the same.
The latter can and should be challenged. I 100% agree someone not really engaging at work can have a highly negative impact.
IMO we should aim for "highly engaged 9 to 5 - but then enjoy life"!
>IMO we should aim for "highly engaged 9 to 5 - but then enjoy life"!
I agree, but that perspective doesn't reconcile with the point higher up in the thread from somebody who works in the field of identifying high performers. I believe their point was that the "work is a job" people can't really compete with the "work is my life" group. Naturally then, the latter group would then be constantly outpacing the others.
That's a fair point. The challenge is to decide what you want from life - to be a Top 1% Career Winner or someone who spreads their resources more evenly, with the compromises that really does force.
You can crush it and give your all in your 20s, and take a difference pace later on at the right time for you, and that can work very well for people, it often does!
The original article is cautioning against an all-in-one-basket approach that - rather than launch you into the career achievement place you expect - ends up taking more than you can give and burning you out.
It's also not all-or-nothing. Consider a Normal Distribution of achievement, it's entirely OK to be in the top 25% or 10% rather than top 1%. None of us I'm sure wants to be in the bottom percentiles, but it's fine to not even aim for the very very top. That's my view anyway, others will definitely disagree!
You're completely right. I just don't know how a "Career 1%" person can continue that path in a team full of, say, "Kayak 1%" types. At some point, the team will limit your trajectory.
I guess it speaks to finding your tribe of people with similar values.
How do we define being "the best at technology"? In software there are some types of tasks that truly benefit from any additional hour worked, but plenty of others for which that is actively counterproductive.
I'd say I've done some of the worst work of my career during the weeks of deepest crunch time. Many of the people I've known closely who've worked like that long term have had stress-induced medical problems.
It's also interesting to point to Olympians here...elite athletes follow carefully planned training programs to balance training and rest to avoid overtraining, and while the best of the best can work up to massive training loads, there is a point for every human where additional training hours start to negatively impact your performance. To my understanding, recent research actually suggests elite athletes should sleep a couple of hours per night more than most people, so in some way a key piece of "doing anything to win" involves scheduling time to do nothing at all.
The absence of a strict metric yielding a total ordering (if you want to get all math pissy about it) over all people who write code does not in fact create any confusion about where Carmack or Dean sit relative to the average shmuck (e.g. me) who knows what a branch table buffer is and knows what it is on Golden Cove and Xen 3, and the fucking JavaScript-only people.
I hate that knowing your craft and not being embarrassed about it is a faux pas around here.
When did people who haven’t put in the time become a protected class? It’s not borderline racist to know why Electron apps suck ass in excruciating detail.
Maybe I have a holistic view but I think the adderall-popping hypothetical person is only good at churning out lines of code.
The Kayaker is building experiences and growing as a person, and probably allowing their subconscious to solve the difficult problems while they are consciously enjoying nature. I think that having a diverse set of experiences ultimately makes you a better problem-solver since you can apply abstract concepts from one domain to another. From an entrepreneurial perspective, you can see a need within one of your hobbies that needs to be fulfilled, and apply your technical skills to it. Meanwhile the adderall person has churned out 1000 lines of business logic for their employer.
There is obviously more nuance to it than that, but the most intelligent people I have met were all incredibly well-rounded. I have also met people who probably had the potential to be equally as intelligent, but their laser focus on a single subject stunted their growth and they can only talk about/entertain ideas within their super specific niche. They become boring and unable to work with others.
There are certainly a lot of single-minded individuals who think just churning out lines of business logic will get them ahead, and I think most would agree that doesn't work in the long run.
But there is also that crowd of people who know that a more holistic set of experiences helps them get ahead in their career.
> Kayaker is ... allowing their subconscious to solve the difficult problems while they are consciously enjoying nature
To an extent taking your mind off a problem and mulling over it helps. But there's no subconscious doing the work, in the end spending the weekend thinking about a problem with a few breaks will definitely make more progress than a weekend Kayaking and not thinking about work.
When I was in school I had epiphanies or "click" moments on several occasions either while I slept or while I was at the gym staring off into space and lifting weights with no other thoughts in my head. So from my personal experiences I do think that our unconscious mind works at some level solving problems.
Most Olympians train less than 40 hours per week. Yes, they make some sacrifices, such as not having that ice cream or drinking water at the bar but it's very possible (and normal) to have a life outside training.
Besides, nobody's gonna sponsor a boring Olympian.
The Olympic level athlete I knew trained most every moment she had that wasn't committed to other things, like school and sleep. Her life from about age 5 to 17 or so was about her sport.
I dunno what sports might require "sacrificing ice cream" but AFAIK Olympians are nuts and have very little life after their events.
It's all about the framing. So, is it that "people just fucking crush [some other people]"?
I'd say with that framing you can go kayaking and you'll be constantly vigilant about kayakers around you, building your status, watching their speed, noting their achievements, etc.
On the other hand, take me, I go to work and, miraculously, I don't feel being "crushed" by any adderall-abusers. I know many people who commit a lot more than me, I know many CEOs or managers decade younger than me, my old roommates are now tenured professors at respectable universities, and you got me wonder just now, maybe I just have a blind spot and they are "crushing" me day by day somehow, going in circles while firing their machine guns at me. Who knows? I sure don't feel it in any way, they all seem really decent folks, so maybe it turns that ignorance is bliss after all, no?
I struggle to even image how would that be done, but I have some ideas. Maybe if I cared about certifications, or went extensively to every meetup, or tried to lead a community, or bragged about my salary, maybe then I would have opened a hatch to get signals from those people. I don't, so I won't.
Maybe it has something to do with me keeping all too many hobbies (I'm thinking about dropping two or three of them actually, and that includes hn) plus my kids?
> It’s unfortunate but true that the ICM, adderall-abusing, 20hrs/day people just fucking crush the folks who kayak on the weekend.
Maybe, but at some point - hopefully before they burn out - they'll realize they are drug addicts without any meaningful life outside of work, and then they take up kayaking on the weekends.
Non-facetious question: will kayaking bring them meaning in life?
I’m a little burnt out on these articles that talk about work life balance, 4 day work weeks, UBI. Not working isn’t going to bring you meaning in life, it’ll probably make you more sedentary and feel more isolated from the world (or at least it does for me).
Not physically sedentary, but for velocity of life, yes. How is life any different after you go kayaking? You haven't learned any new ideas, or built anything, or improved some skill.
That's not to say that kayaking has zero value, but I find it hard to imagine someone saying "I was in a really hard spot in life, but then I went kayaking and it changed everything".
I find it a lot easier to imagine someone saying "I built a chrome extension as a side project and there's a small community that loves it. It brings me a lot of pride to hear from them in the Discord that it's really helping them"
People do that all of the time. They get wrapped up in their workaday lives and go on vacation or into the wilderness and suddenly see a bigger picture view of the world and that changes things. Kayaking is one venue for that. Nature is not something to be avoided in favor of even more technology.
At BigCorp, I was a "this is my life" IC. But minus the Adderall. It took nearly two years to understand that my coworkers were using stimulants to keep up their level of effort. It was a revelation, but one that strongly contributed to my departure.
>It’s unfortunate but true that the ICM, adderall-abusing, 20hrs/day people just fucking crush the folks who kayak on the weekend.
Not sure what ICM means, but if it's coding on adderall, 20hrs/day is not going to make great code. And this is assuming all of the requirements are perfectly written and understood. Especially if you're not taking adderall therapeutically.
This is something I struggle with, and there’s some good advice in here (though nothing particularly novel). I do want to call out one thing that probably doesnt work that’s in this article:
The idea of scheduling your downtime. Or blocking off “leisure time” on your calendar
This would be akin to an alcoholic putting “sober blocks” on their calendar. It doesn’t address the problem, it in fact acknowledges and accepts the problem as normal.
For me the biggest problems have been: taking on too much too fast, and my phone.
For the first, saying No has been the cure though still difficult sometimes. The second I think does not get the attention it deserves. Delete work email, delete work slack, delete work calendars from your phones. If you are literally carrying your work around with you in your pocket every waking hour there’s no chance you’re going to avoid it.
Growing weary of these "give yourself more grace" articles tbh.
> 1. Untangle your self-worth and your work
I think a lot of people propose to themselves static mindsets about how they currently "feel". You might currently feel that your self worth and your work are conflated into one thing, and that can be motivating, but it won't last forever. So what do you do knowing that what you're feeling won't last forever? You ride it out and experience the highs/lows of the feeling as it transpires as there is a good chance that the "feeling" will evaporate much sooner than you expect.
Anecdote: For the first couple years of my career I _did_ have conflated feelings of self worth and work. My work was my life for a couple years, and you know what? I don't regret it. It helped establish a good pace, set me leagues apart from my colleagues in terms of experience and knowledge, and landed me far beyond where I thought I could be after graduating. Were there downsides? Absolutely. Would I do anything differently? No, because there would be downsides there too and in the set of all possible options, I think I chose the best one.
There is nothing wrong with trying hard.
There is nothing wrong with trying hard for long periods of time.
There is nothing wrong with experiencing burnout.
There is nothing wrong with working to overcome burnout.
These attitudes have negative consequences. Trying to avoid them also has negative consequences. You're going to experience negative consequences, and that's okay.
Since taking up management, I've taken increasingly tiny, dilute concentrations of productivity. I believe my work "remembers" the productivity even though the dose is too small to detect, and helps my body and mind to resist it when it is encountered in higher levels.
One aspect of "toxic productivity" I was thinking of that wasn't addressed in the article is not how it affects you, but how it may affect your work. I have often worked with people who could get a lot done quickly, but what came out of it was so half-baked that it was of little or no value or required several cycles of feedback until it could be used. So it's not only the quantity of stuff you do, you have to also keep an eye on the quality...
I see that more as such people pretending to be productive, when they aren't. Some examples are managers in all kinds of constant meetings, as if that is work by itself, versus actual outcomes. Related to that, are people you see working excessive hours and give all kinds of reasons for it, but the actual output is very little or doesn't justify the extra hours.
People who are faking productivity can be quite hard to spot, because often they look busy. If others become suspicious and try to confront them or try to detangle the spaghetti of inefficient practices, there is often a flood of excuses and illogic. Not necessarily just with the workers, but also with supervisors or managers, who are hiding that they don't know or are not sure about what they are doing.
What's this trend about prefixing every word by "toxic" nowadays, to characterize how too much of a thing can be bad? In the past we used to have common sense... So alcoholics now should be described as "toxic drinkers" too?
What's with the trend of suffixing every world with "-oholic" then-a-days, to characterize how too much of a thing can be bad?
Language changes. We used to make up words like "shopaholic". Now we might say "toxic consumerism" if we didn't already have a word for it. Different forms that mean the same thing; no need to get worked up over it.
I had a similar reaction at first, but thinking about it it actually makes sense here, because the productivity urge becomes toxic to the person in question. (In a slightly different spin, the person may also have become intoxicated by productivity.) My initial reaction is really only due to the prevalence of the word “toxic” in modern discourse, and not because the traditional meaning wouldn’t fit here.
The 3x culture is the culprit, everything needs to be fast, there's so many things to do, so many dramas to binge, so many trends to chase, so many methods to get things done.
In the end, small wins become a curse, win big or go home and watch YouTube videos about productivity, on 3x.
> After all, what good is your time if you aren’t doing something with it?
Actually calculating how much my time is worth helped me answer this. Divide money earned by hours worked to get an $/h figure. Any moment where I can't do anything to earn more than that is free time. This algorithm ensures I only make extra effort when an activity actively improves my value and allows me to enjoy myself completely free from guilt at all other times.
I've decided that enjoying my life is better than making less $/h than I'm currently worth. I'll only accept more work if it pays more than that. My goal is to constantly maximize that figure.
I could accept all jobs regardless of pay and make more money by working at all times but that suffers from a serious case of diminishing returns. It's harmful for my self-worth and self-respect when I put in extra effort to make less than what my time is worth. So I just do nothing instead.
> Create a simple end-of-workday routine (like reviewing your calendar for the next day and clearing all of those used coffee mugs from your desk) to signal to your brain that it’s time to switch out of “work mode.”
I think this is key. I had a 40 minute drive home. I don't miss the drive. What I miss is the demarcation of my workday and transition to free time. Maybe I could switch in and out of tennis shoes, like Mister Rodgers used to do.
Toxic Productivity as the article defines is isn't "working too much" or "being too productive". It is the feeling that should should try far too much to be more productive all the time. The culture that celebrates productivity above life meaning and mental health.
It can be even more daunting for a person if they're paid well and feel like that because of it they have to produce even more results, or otherwise they're paid unfairly, which compounds stress. So it can go both ways.
I spent a good part of my 20s trying to be as productive as possible. I always had projects that I was working on and wasn't particularly satisfied with what I was doing for a living. I felt like I always needed to be pushing myself—learn something new, get better at something I know.
I don't regret it at all. I'm in an excellent position today because of how hard I pushed myself. Maybe there's a bit of difference because most of my productive drive was used outside of work.
Burnout is terrible. At the same time, you won't get to where you want to be in life without effort.
This is why I think GTD is still the best out there. If you go deep into it, you will get it how GTD is not really about gettings things done, but living your life to the max (whatever that means to you).
I dont think he covers how to switch creativity on and off on demand, & most entities are reactionary to events, some of them are beyond their control, even Govt's.
I have more than one kid and their personalities are a world different. One, since she was a baby, had the urgency to do things quickly and learn how to do more at all times. She would operate like she is on borrowed time since as long as she could move. She would ask for something once and go do it herself. Bring everyone else’s shoes after getting ready, while my son is still putting his pants etc. I was the same way. Growing up I had this feeling every second is precious. My mind can move fast and solve tough problems and invent and I didn’t want to waste it as time is precious. This urgency varies with time and varies in format. When we had babies, I would absolutely focus and enjoy every moment with them, because those are short and never come back either. And even so, my mind would come up with ideas, while holding a little one, and I would jot those down writing or dictating on my phone whenever necessary.
Yes, there is also toxic workaholism - where financial pressures, peer pressure and other reasons cause people to be lost in the work and burnout. The biggest reasons for burnout in my book is not working too much, but working where the volume of work doesn’t match the reward, or where you ignore sleep depravation and don’t pay off sleep debt (not eating enough while working may lead to that as well). So if you are lucky enough to get people who are born machines of productivity, make sure you compensate them well so they don’t burn out and ensure they get adequate sleep. It pays pack quickly.
I am rather compulsive with my approach to anything, whether work or leisure, and have a strong tendency to pour myself into the task at hand. I wouldn't categorize this as "toxic productivity", in that I don't feel like it causes me any harm, and isn't focused exclusively on work-related matters. I am the same way with hobbies that I am with work tasks that I find challenging; if I'm going to do a thing, I will do my best to be as good at doing that thing that I possibly can, regardless of the overall merits of me doing that thing.
The part of what is described that resonated is the feeling that I can't "sit still", and have to be "doing something". I've got a three year old daughter whom has improved my life immensely, and yet I still get comments from people about my other projects, and how much I get done regarding those projects, despite having a toddler. My secret, of course, is just that I can't sit still. My free time has been diminished pretty severely by becoming a father, and yet when I have a spare hour or two, I won't sit and relax; I will take that time and try to push through as much as I can on whatever project I'm working on.
I wonder if there is a conflating of pushing oneself too hard or with a toxic work environment, with toxic productivity. I've always seen toxic productivity more in the context of a person having an unbalanced life, where they have nothing going on for themselves but work. When life is completely consumed by work, those types more often mentally burn-out, get into stress related health problems, or we see suicides.
That a person sets goals for themselves that they seek to accomplish, is often a good thing. Those goals usually only become problematic when they are unrealistic or its too much, too soon. Like if a person is way too overweight, but thinks they are going to be able to run a marathon in a month. So by pushing an exercise routine to the limit, they begin to have say knee or back problems.
If a person is simply goal-orientated or competitive in multiple aspects of their lives, I don't see that as toxic, unless they are taking it to extremes. Like if it is causing relationship, stress, or mental health issues.
This brings me back to the book "Four Thousand Weeks" (not "4000 Weeks"!) which was recommended to me here on HN and which goes (among others) into the idea that the very concept of measuing time and treating it as some source of resource (that is naturally scarce and valuable!) is a very modern, western way to see it.
I think a possible problem with this concept is the assumption that its application is a constant. It's definitely a bad thing to produce in the extreme _all the time_, however from time to time, depending on the industry or pursuit, an otherwise unhealthy obsession is admirable and necessary. Without such a thing, many of our innovations and industries would not exist today -- Tesla was pretty "toxically productive," it could be argued. Certainly in his case, he probably took it too far at times, but we'd be in mud huts with no running water if individuals such as he were not permitted to operate as they see fit.
If an individual or group of individuals doesn't want to be hyper-focused, fine, don't do it, but it's a dangerous thing to judge others who may be different for being different form you.
Oof as someone who makes a living as an artist this article hit hard. There's little to no separation between what I do and who I am. Been thinking about inhabiting character modes/avatars as different modes of output hopefully without introducing some schizoid element(?)
I had colleague that could be described in such way. Working with him was difficult and He was handed bs tasks just so others could focus on their own work.
I'd say that trying to be extremely productive in some large companies won't lead to promotion or appreciation.
Focusing 100% on work for a few years, then taking one of two years off is an alternative I’d recommend. Focus brings huge benefits to both work and not-work
> Create a simple end-of-workday routine (like reviewing your calendar for the next day and clearing all of those used coffee mugs from your desk) to signal to your brain that it’s time to switch out of “work mode.”
Off-topic: scroll down to their site footer, it is a full page size. I've seen many adopt this pseudo professional look, marketing feeling, like *we have a ton of thing* or *we are really big*. I found it's uncomfortable.
Another term for this bias is "type A personality". It's fine if you have this yourself, just understand that many people are less motivated and more relaxed to even apathetic, and that can be okay.
I saw in the news recently that relatively many (relative to women) pensioner males kill themselves because they find that they have no purpose in their post-work lives.
Reminds me of the episode of King of the Hill where Hank worried about if his obituary headline read "Hank Hill: Found Dead, Not Working" because it would be embarrassing
Yes. And it's interesting to note how successfully the Energizer brand has co-opted it such that when seening "Duracell Bunny", an HN poster wants to "fix it."
Well, to be fair, the author of the article is (likely) too young to have remembered the original Duracell Bunny (I'm 60, and barely remembered it, myself), and almost certainly meant the Energizer Bunny, since that is the conventional idiom, these days.
So...be nice. I could have worded my "correction" better (e.g. "Did the author mean the Energizer Bunny?"), or, better still, not have made the comment in the first place (it wasn't necessary, and I admit that. I probably won't do it again). I did correct myself, upvoted the HN user that corrected me, and, as a general rule, I do not take opportunities to launch unprovoked slaps at HN users that I don't know.
I've learned that it's generally a bad idea to initiate relationships with attacks. There's no upside.
When you are passionate about your work, it can easily bleed into every other area of your life — you read about work-related topics in your free time, you think about a particularly challenging problem in the shower, you journal about your work, etc. It also changes ones social circle: hanging out with an ambitious and curious start-up crowd easily leads to work as the default topic in a gathering of friends. Once you have work deeply embedded in your interests and social life, it does not take a huge mental leap to "work is what defines me as an individual".
That then leads to a precarious "all eggs in one basket" situation that leaves you vulnerable in cases of professional failure ("My start-up is not doing well; I am a failure") or burnout ("I'm cynical about my work; nothing matters").
It took quite a bit of time to disentangle my self-worth and my professional identity, but it makes life so much better.