A for effort
Once the novelty wears off, people will just want to be able to swipe their cards. (Image by Francesco)
One afternoon at The Little Middle School, I emerged from my office to find a valuable employee painstakingly disentangling a stack of wired headphones.
This was not the best use of her time, but she was reluctant to be torn away from the project.
I get it. Often, it’s easier and more immediately rewarding to do a task that’s far below our pay grade than to work on the stuff that only we can do — much harder stuff that might take longer to yield a satisfying result.
I believe this employee was organizing these headphones because she wanted to, not because she felt she had to — after all, there were plenty of adolescents standing around who could have been deployed to quickly take care of this work.
This tendency to hang onto tasks and projects that are easy to complete seems to be common as people move up in their careers. These people will improve their productivity and their prospects to the extent that they can delegate or drop these things and focus on tasks and projects that require a higher level of knowledge and skill.
That said, an even more troublesome habit is a tendency to hang onto tasks and projects that are highly time-consuming and make us miserable yet yield little in the way of results.
This happens when we are used to measuring the value of our work based on the effort we put in. The effort is what makes us feel safe and productive, not the results. Therefore, we grind for hours with not much to show for it.
The roots of this type of behavior are evident in school, where students are generally rewarded for effort. Study for hours to learn what’s on the test, then forget it all a couple of days later. Be present to all of your classes even if you already know the material. Write a paper that has no reason to exist because it will be the same as the 24 papers your classmates wrote. Show your work and make your notes pretty — binder checks will affect your grade.
Lots of entry level jobs also reward effort (or apparent effort). If you work in retail, you can’t be standing around. Instead, you can be refolding clothes that are already folded, dusting shelves that have already been dusted, or sweeping a floor that’s already been swept.
For far too long, I carried these practices into my life as a small business owner. It never occurred to me to streamline the work by finding better systems and tools. It definitely never crossed my mind that I could hire someone. Instead, I slogged away, doing everything the hard way. My only positive result was a feeling of virtue.
Eventually, I got to a point where all of my effort was impractical; what’s more, it was no longer pleasing to me. It took me a long time to clean up my own mess, but I found systems, software, and people to help me.
The biggest shift, however, wasn’t logistical. It was a change in my own mindset. I decided that the time and effort that I put into something was neither a measure of its value nor of my own worthiness. I realized what it was costing me to be a worker in my own business, leaving my organization without a leader.
As uncomfortable as it had been to, say, stuff envelopes for six hours on a Sunday night, it was more uncomfortable to confront all of the things I didn’t know and all of the skills I didn’t have as a business owner and leader of a team. I longed for straightforward tasks like data entry, ordering office supplies, and answering the phone.
To this day, however, the stuff that’s mine to do is the stuff that will stretch me. The stuff that is uncertain and unclear. It doesn’t feel like hard work. Sometimes I’m just staring out the window, thinking. Sometimes I’m engaged in conversation with a colleague. But I’ve learned that those are the activities that will yield results far beyond what my decades of elbow grease could ever deliver.
There is no A for effort once we’re out of school. We are free to choose what to do and how to do it. We may choose not to grind through low-level tasks but to forge a path that won’t even require them. In fact, it could be that people are depending on us to make this change. Sometimes, it’s hard to stop the busywork long enough to look up and notice.
