Networking.
Certifications.
Side-hustles.
Sometimes it feels like our industry - and wider society along with it - is pushing us more and more towards an always-on state. A situation where anyone not doing more than their expected load is incompetent, and those going beyond expectations are simply getting the passing grade. While there have always been culturally-specific examples, such as Japan’s practice of Karoshi, or the more modern example of Silicon Valley’s toxic workplaces, it seems the rise of social media, in particular sites like Twitter and LinkedIn, have helped redefine an unsustainable level of work as a seemingly normal practice in our day and age.
You don’t need to look very far for examples - Rockstar Games boasted of team members pulling “100-hour weeks” to get Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped. Elon Musk’s proclamation that “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week” shames those of us who simply want fair working conditions and a bit of work/life balance. Finally, the New York Times highlighted Tesla and We Work (among others) as culprits earlier this year in an article railing against “Hustle” culture, with this gem of a paragraph capturing a perfect sense of irony:
“But today, as tech culture infiltrates every corner of the business world, its hymns to the virtues of relentless work remind me of nothing so much as Soviet-era propaganda, which promoted impossible-seeming feats of worker productivity to motivate the labor force. One obvious difference, of course, is that those Stakhanovite posters had an anticapitalist bent, criticizing the fat cats profiting from free enterprise. Today’s messages glorify personal profit, even if bosses and investors — not workers — are the ones capturing most of the gains.”
Now there is nothing wrong with working more than the bare minimum - it reflects a sense of ownership and pride in one’s work if we choose to finish off that one last document, get that one last build out the door, or do a bit of after-hours work to get a project across the line. But there is an important distinction here to the aforementioned toxic cultures; for a start, we are choosing to finish something, rather than being culturally indoctrinated to do so, and for all intents and purposes the extra work we do should be an exception to our usual work practice, not part of it. I choose to work late on Tuesdays because it suits _me_, with an indoor cricket game ususally starting a couple of hours after work. It doesn’t mean that I am going to do it every night - and it certainly doesn’t mean that my bosses should expect it of me each day.
I’m certainly not railing against the entreprenurial spirit here, or the desire of people to become self-made and pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps for a better life for they and their family. But I _am_ concerned that we’re in danger of losing something if we do let the idea of a 40 hour work week become discarded as the occupation of losers, no-hopers, and those lacking ambition. We already have so many devices, distractions, and notifications in our lives - I would hate it if our desire to grease palms and climb ladders would rob us of our time to do nothing at all.
We already know that work pressures and constant distractions are enroaching on our ability to sleep, and interrupting some of the important processes our brain does while our eyes are shut. But it’s not just sleep that’s important - each of us needs some time to switch off and wind down throughout the week to maintain our own mental and physical well-being. Yes, we have out-of-work opportunities, like playing sport or seeing friends and family, that we may think of as ‘downtime’ in our busy lives; but in reality these activities still represent us doing something. What I’m talking about is the ability to really do nothing at all, to simply veg and chill out, and either be alone with our thoughts or do something that blanks our brain out entirely.
Personally, I’ve always loved things like listening to test cricket on the radio - yes, there’s a love of the game that’s involved in it, but there’s something about the length of the broadcast, the ebb and flow of a match that to others could be considered slow and boring, but to me represents a way to relax and recharge. The fact that it’s on the radio adds an extra dimension, because it ususally comes with skilled orators and commentators who let the game do the talking but still provide enough detail and dashes of colour to entertain, without coming across as a group of bombastic idiots. Likewise, my wife doesn’t really get why I watch Youtube or Twitch streams of people playing games (be they of the board or electronic type). “Wouldn’t you rather be playing them yourself?” she’d ask. Often, the answer is yes - I play these games too - but the reality is I watch these VODs for the same reason that she might watch something like The Bachelor; it’s something you can do for some mild entertainment while turning off the great big machine in your skull for a while, tuning out the fact that there’s a complex problem awaiting you the next day, or in her case a group of unfathomably immature year nine students.
There are times when the success of some of your friends or follows can get to you - Jess is now a qualified AWS Architect; Tom has successfully finished the night school course he’s been slogging away at for a couple of years; Stacy is getting promoted after completing her Masters degree. Facebook, Twitter, and especially the cesspool of self-boasting that is LinkedIn only make these pressures feel worse, by magnifying only he best and cutting out all that is quiet and mundane in other people’s lives. The fact is though, we all need quiet and mundane moments to function - and we simply shouldn’t feel guilty about piping to /dev/null now and again. A failure to ease up and wind down can have serious health risks and be incredibly isolating to those around us. It also turns out that some of the brighest moments of ingenuity and imagination can come from the most mundane situations.
So the next time you feel like you aren’t doing enough with your life, think instead about whether you’re doing enough of nothing. It might just recharge you and provide the clarity that you’re looking for.