ILLUSTRATION: JOHN. S. DYKES
After I graduated from college I started a business providing sound reinforcement services to local bands. Building my own Altec Lansing Voice of the Theater loudspeaker cabinet introduced me what was to become a decades-long addiction, not to any drug, but to work. It wasn’t until years later that I came across the concept of flow, but I knew what it was like to be in the zone building stuff. Hours flew by like minutes and the body signals of both hunger and the need to for rest were shut down. That single project introduced me to the addictive nature of work and helped turn me into both a perfectionist and a workaholic. I wrote previously of The Dangers of Perfectionism, now it’s time to tackle the dangers of addiction to working.
As usual it was an article the spurred to write a blog post, this time The Wall Street Journal article by Jason Gray. I always look forward to Jason’s articles on sports in the Journal but the sports columnist tackled a serious business issue in his article Working Like Crazy May Actually Be, Well, Crazy, sub-titled Are you griping about working too much, or bragging about it? If you are too busy working to read the full article – which I highly recommend – here’s my synopsis coupled with my some of my experiences.
Jason provides a great, and typically humorous, self-test for workaholism. Does any of this seem familiar?
I can’t believe how much of a time suck this project has been.
I feel like I’m living at the office.
I’ve forgotten my dog’s name.
I just returned 20 emails on a Sunday.
Peanut. I think the dog’s name is Peanut.
Jason introduces the concept of the workbrag – the element of pride embedded in our complaints about the long hours we work. The Apple team that built the Macintosh proudly wore T-shirts reading “Working 90 hours a week and loving it!” Workaholism seems part and parcel of working in technology and media. The advent of the Internet and mobile phones has enabled the always on 24 x 7 connection to work and the workplace. The two metrics that founders often tout – much to my dismay, as neither correlate positively with a venture’s success – are how many employees they have and how many hours a week they work.
But I fell into the trap of working crazy hours myself. Predating the internet, I remember having at-home access to Software Art‘s Prime minicomputer, enabling me to send and receive email, draft and review documents, and effectively work at home. For someone who ate, lived, and slept his job this was paradise by the VT100 terminal light. And I still remember that when I told my co-founder of my first startup that bought an early flip phone, the Motorola StarTAC, he responded with glee that he could now get in touch with me wherever I was, any time of the day!
At don’t recall exactly when it was that I discovered the downside of working crazy hours – that errors start creeping in when you are pushing past natural limits. Then when trying to correct those errors you end up creating new errors! It finally dawned on me that working past my limits was counter productive. I could actually deliver higher quality work by putting in less hours. That lead me to start monitoring my teams and not so subtly reminding them of our vacation policy, which we made “use it or lose” it to prod our staff to take needed time off. And we added personal days to the company’s benefits package so staff didn’t use up their vacation days or use their sick days when some type of personal obligation – like closing on buying a house – demanded their in-person attention. However, being a workaholic I hired people in my own image, so we had teams full of workaholics! And I was seeing their error rate rising when they exceeded a normal day’s work of eight to ten hours.
Jason’s article is based on a talk he hosted by the authors of a new book It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier at a Wall Street Journal event in New York City.
The authors are co-founders of the workplace software company Basecamp, Fried and Hansson are successful entrepreneurs who pay their employees to take vacation—not vacation time but the actual vacation. Fried and Hansson’s company used to have one of those “limitless vacation” policies, until they realized that it made employees nervous about taking vacation. Now they insist on three weeks.
The concept of work-life balance hadn’t emerged until years after I did my last startup. Whether or not people actually do attempt to balance their work life with their personal life or just give the phrase lip service I don’t know.
But as a reformed workaholic I’ve learned how to turn off work and spend more time with my friends and family, though I’ve yet to learn how to actually stop thinking about work when I’m not working!
Mentorphile 