The hoops are optional

No way around it: you’ve got to work your muscles if you want to get stronger. (Image by David Mark)

Lots of school assignments are just for show.

Even assignments with a legitimate objective will often be padded out with superfluous tasks to make them seem more interesting, substantial, or fun. But often, it just makes them take longer.

That’s how a first-grader finds herself doing an addition worksheet that requires, for instance, coloring each box based on the sum in order to create a picture of a flower. If the child already knows her addition facts, it doesn’t take long to do the addition problems themselves. However, each such worksheet has a different set of instructions that must be worked out with a patient adult who can read and interpret them, so the child can’t establish any independence. Plus, the coloring makes the worksheet take longer.

And if the child doesn’t know her addition facts, a worksheet like this makes the task at hand more frustrating and opaque. That flower is going to end up with some green petals, I’m afraid. Cue the tears and shame.

Asking students to practice addition facts is perfectly reasonable. However, if the meaning of the task gets obscured or distorted by its form, it can be very confusing and exhausting. There are ways to help students practice skills or demonstrate knowledge that don’t require spending many hours on tasks irrelevant to the lesson’s objectives.

Unfortunately, some of us get so used to this type of busywork that we come to crave it. When things are simple, we feel like we must not be doing enough. Adding complexity—or even just fluff—gives us a feeling of comfort and satisfaction. This is not always rewarded in our adult careers (although, problematically, it often is!).

If we want to achieve bigger results with less effort, we need to be crystal clear on our objective. This is likely to lead us straight to intimidating work that we don’t want to do. Confronting the three addition facts you forget over and over doesn’t feel as good as completing a worksheet filled with a bunch of facts you already know. However, the ugly work is more likely to lead to the outcome you’re actually looking for.

I see lots of aspiring business owners get stuck like this. They have been trained to believe, by lots of companies selling expensive workshops and courses, that they need a robust and relentless online presence consisting of bustling social profiles, constant content creation, and slick head shots, plus a meticulously designed “sales funnel” complete with a fancy website, lead magnet, and pop-up opt-ins.

The diligent would-be entrepreneur might spend years trying to put this all together without realizing that they could have started by calling trusted colleagues to say, “Hey, I want to do this thing…can you introduce me to a few people who might be interested?” Yes, that’s potentially awkward and difficult—and much more efficient. The path to revenue (or refining your offer to something people actually want) is much faster.

It feels productive to plan out a month’s worth of social media posts or take an online course, just like it feels productive to complete the packet of worksheets your teacher gave you. But what, exactly, are you producing? The task at hand might have been cleverly designed to obscure the objective (perhaps just to keep you busy or to make someone else some money), or you might have earnestly undertaken it without realizing that you had no concrete objective in doing so. Either way, it might not be helping you to get where you want to go.

The best tasks and projects are an end in themselves. I write because writing and sharing my ideas is a worthy challenge. I’m learning French because it’s fun and I will be able to speak French. If what we’re doing isn’t creating value in some way, we ought to question its necessity. It may not be a hoop we actually need to jump through to achieve what we want. It may just be for show. If we’re willing to question some of these constructs, we may discover that we can be more successful than we had imagined—and in less time, too.