For ambitious and motivated people, work never ends. There’s always more to do than can be done. We need an approach to work that emphasizes prioritization, focus, and deep attention. An approach to work that focuses on getting more done faster is akin to asking Sisyphus to move faster.
Work, once it successfully delivers on our basic practical necessities, is only worthwhile when it acts as an avenue for fulfillment and human flourishing. Working in a way that causes anxiety, stress, and burnout is not acceptable. We should demand that our workdays and work environment create fulfillment and joy.
For many people, work is a source of great stress and anxiety. Going to work isn’t something you eagerly look forward to each day. It’s something you dread and wish you didn’t have to do.
We don’t accept that. We want work to be a great source of meaning and fulfillment in our lives. This is important to us because work takes up more of our lives than just about anything else.
We think this should be possible for most kinds of work (with one exception*).
*The one exception being work you feel is inherently evil or harmful to the world, in which case no amount of ideal working conditions are going to absolve the feeling of existential despair, and we recommend trying to get a different job.
Why is work so often a negative force in people’s lives? What we’ve observed is a set of structural and behavioral patterns we’ll call “bad work culture.”
People spend too much time working on things that don’t matter, and have too little time for things that do.
How many of hours of deep, focused, uninterrupted work do you get in a day? How many of those hours are spent doing something that is of genuine value? We intuitively know when we’re spending our time on busy work, and this creates a sense of existential dread. Why bother working on this?
People spend too much time at work, period.