The Overloaded Worker
Notes on Workload
Deep Life Notes | Workload
Too much work, too many tools, and too much speed can short-circuit the brain, leaving people anxious, distracted, and guilty for slowing down. It doesn’t have to be this way.
I was recently asked to write 250 words on what work meant to me. If you asked that question to someone 150 years ago, you’d get a strange look. Work was something that was done to get a wage and try to survive: it was repetitive and monotonous in the industrial age.
Today, knowledge workers have more autonomy than ever before. We are left to define how we fill each minute of our working day. Yet, despite this freedom, we have seen an alarming increase in worker burnout.
Burnout has become one of the defining problems of modern work. Initiatives like Zoom-free Fridays and No-email Tuesdays have been common, while governments have debated more far-reaching proposals like a shorter working week (which was recently implemented in the UAE for federal employees). As well-intended as they are, I’m not convinced they solve the root causes of burnout for many knowledge workers.
Instead, the more useful place to look is behind the exterior wall of burnout, where two pressures seem to be doing much of the damage.
The first is physical: the sheer volume of work.
The second is mental: our modern-day culture of embracing speed and hustle.
Too much work short-circuits our brains
The computer science professor and author of ‘A World Without Email’ Cal Newport has been a leading voice on how modern knowledge work might be better organised.
In a recent podcast, Newport spoke about a neurological region in our brain that specialises at looking at what we need to get done and creating a long-term plan to do it. It’s unique to humans and why we feel satisfaction when we accomplish a task. However, when we have too many tasks to complete—excessive work volume—that part of the brain begins to short-circuit, creating anxiety.
Newport also highlights what he calls the cost of ‘overhead spiral’ associated with knowledge work. Working with others is often an essential part of our job. For a task or project, ongoing activities such as meetings, calls, and emails are necessary. These are the overheads and they are perfectly reasonable for any single given task or project. But as organisations add more and more tasks and projects to an individual’s plate, these meetings and emails spiral out of control until all someone is doing are Zoom meetings and back-and-forth emails all day. There’s no room for anything else. Anxiety reigns. Projects stall.
His argument starts with reducing work volume.
Work volume is an organisational problem too
Reducing work volume is difficult, which may be why it is so often avoided. The dreaded company edict of "do more, with less” is usually unfurled to weary employees after redundancies, budget cuts, or a tough patch for the organisation. The unsaid message is abundantly clear: we might have fewer people, but all the work still needs to be done, and you are the lucky folks who get to do it. An easy message to communicate, yes. But motivational it is not. Nor, usually, is it effective.
As Newport says, “in the world of work, what’s easiest is rarely what’s most effective.”
Newport argues that organisations have a role to play in keeping someone’s work at a more manageable level. One way organisations could achieve this is by assigning work sequentially: people work on a smaller number of important tasks, complete them, and only then move on to the next. This minimises rapidly switching between tasks, which drains energy and consumes time. We might think of sequential work like a triage system in hospital emergency rooms. What’s most important gets done first.
Technology helps companies in this approach today, with digital tools like personal Kanban and Trello. Used well, these tools can create better workflows to organise and assign tasks, with more automation and less context-shifting, resulting in less distracted and more focused workers.
It’s not about organisations doing less. It’s about the individuals in that organisation being given better systems that help them focus, organise and deliver their work, and maintain their sense of autonomy. And it’s likely they will produce a higher quality of work as a result, with no spiralling overheads or feelings of anxiety associated with too heavy a workload.
Let people do what they do well. Then give them the next thing to work on.
This type of approach isn’t easy or quick. Leaders of organisations can consider spending more time thinking about how work is actually organised. This might involve experimenting in smaller groups and running pilots. It’s hard, but the prize is significant: less-stressed workers who are more focused, more productive, and more capable of producing higher-quality work. That will impact the bottom line, too.
Slowing down changes what we notice and how we do it
Going hand in hand with the reduction in work volume by the organisation is the individual side: learning to slow down. To move away from the all-too-common ‘crazy busy’ response.
Jennifer Roberts is an art history teacher at Harvard University. The first assignment she gives her students is to visit a local museum and choose a painting or sculpture. They must then look at it for three straight hours. No checking email or social media, no going for coffee. Just intent focus for three hours.
Roberts sees this assignment as a critical life lesson for her students—to resist the urge to hurry. She knows they face so many external pressures to move fast. She gives them a different set of rules: time to slow down, to take things in, and focus on the craft.
At various stages during the assignment, the chosen art reveals things the eye didn’t see at first. That leads to new thoughts and perspectives. Students learn the satisfaction from the doing itself.
In a similar vein, the Dutch have something called ‘niksen’, which is intentionally taking time and energy to do activities like gazing out a window. They understand the scientific research that by allowing our minds to wander, we become more creative and better at problem-solving.
The guilt of slowing down
This concept of slowing down feels at odds with how successful modern lives are built. People may feel guilty about adjusting their pace. But guilt may be the wrong response. It’s not really slowing down in the sense of abandoning or retreating from something. Slowing down can often mean a more deliberate way of working and in our approach to daily life. It recognises we can’t do everything and that a smaller number of meaningful things may bring more contentment. Reducing our own volume.
There are better ways to approach burnout at both the organisational and individual level. The ones covered above that recognise both the financial need of organisations to continue to grow and turn a profit, and the basic human need of knowledge workers to not feel like they are standing under a giant dam about to burst armed with only a small plastic bucket.
At the same time, a more honest acceptance by individuals that life does not have to move at breakneck pace to be rich and rewarding can help us slow down in ways that may allow us to create better things. Here, the words of a man, Socrates, who moved at his own pace feel apt:
“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”
We can write them on a yellow sticky note and fix them to that dam about to burst.