Workaholism

I’m not ignoring what is going on but I just need to think about other things. I think we’re heading into the headwinds of the storm – it looks like New York is going to break in the next week.

So, I got to think of other stuff to reduce my anxiety and fear.

I’ve written a few posts on selected readings on Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. This post will be on workaholism. There is so much paeans to the virtues of workaholism. Entrepreneurs swear by it, corporate chieftains laud those who goes above and beyond, and workers show their allegiance by giving their all, no matter the cost. Such heroism!

The authors don’t buy this.

“Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid.” Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, 2010, p. 25.

Although I have some workaholic tendencies, I do agree with the authors.

One example that I have seen goes all the way back into my college years when I was doing chemical engineering. We would stay up late at night trying to figure out how to do our homework. I think I got up at 7 or 8 in the morning, attended classes and stayed up until 1 or 2 in the morning. I remember a particular instance where a class mate, who made better grades than the rest of us, was talking about how she couldn’t solve a problem. The particular problem she was having was actually the easy problem and I was puzzled why she had problems because I could solve it. Then she told me not when you doing it at 4 in the morning.

Ah, that made a lot of sense. And that was the first instance where I learned that it’s a lot harder to maintain clear thinking at 4 am in the morning.

The next lesson was when I was at the Beaumont Refinery when we did the annual budgeting. Somebody had described working at a refinery to me as working in a sweatshop; the budgeting exercise was a perfect example of a sweatshop. I think we worked 7 days a week from 7 or 8 in the morning to about 8, 9, 10 and even beyond midnight. Saturday was a full day but I believe Sunday was short. My memory of the timespan is vague but after maybe 3 months of this, people’s health were affected. One person described how her eyes started to “bug out” or maybe develop tremors.

And the last lesson I want to bring out is that you can lose your judgement after working so many hours. Your decision-making ability declines. Again, related to budgeting, we had worked many hours – my boss had worked an extreme number of hours, sleeping at work and working through the weekends - and were finalizing the numbers. I was making sure that numbers added up correctly but we were off by between $100 to $500 out of millions of dollars. But by then, perspectives were lost, materiality factor was forgotten and that variance was regarded as not “good enough”. Fortunately, our client was okay with it; it was no big deal.

Instead of working ungodly hours, you have to find a better, smarter way of working. Doing it by brute force eventually causes mistakes and burnout.