This One Simple Trick Is Helping Me Work Like a Normal Person
Applying learnings from the 1977 essay 'Learning to Work' to fix my broken brain
In Virginia Valian’s 1977 essay ‘Learning to Work’, the author describes what she calls her “..work problem, its symptoms, and [her] cure for it”. Valian describes work problems as “people who do not work as much or as effectively as they would like, who fall short of their aspirations, and who do not fit the canonical mold of a successful person,” and shares examples of her own struggles, such as sometimes being able to work for only 5 minutes a day and grappling with anxiety and self-doubt about her productivity and output.
Valian suggests the causes of work problems can be rooted in those anxieties, and made worse by “tending to think that even semi-productive people are anxiety-free. We tend to think that people's insides and outsides exactly correspond, and that their insides are completely consistent.” This resonated with me.
I have a work problem. I find it difficult to really work. I stay busy. Output happens, goals are met, fires are extinguished and Stuff Gets Done, but often I don’t seem to ‘work’ effectively. I’m the full-time CEO of a company I founded and we’ve been reasonably successful - so there’s been a lot of achievement, which must have come from a lot of work of sorts. But it’s often felt fragmented and stuttering, punctuated by distraction.
Focus hasn’t been my strong point. I work with a lot of different people, have many direct reports, and an unused bottle of Concerta XL on my desk from an ADHD diagnosis. Seemingly, I love to switch context, to check emails and work messaging apps, to look at my to-do list, to feel the tiny little buzz of a notification.
Except I don’t love it. I know what I really love is making progress on the big stuff. What gives me real satisfaction - and helps the company most - is real work on the things that I (and usually others too) don’t want to do. But while I might love having done this stuff and the mid-point feeling of progress, like a difficult workout, I don’t seem to love starting or sticking with it for prolonged periods of time. My approach is usually to wait until it must be done, and then to grind through it over multiple work sessions interspersed with lots of checking, context switching and easier efforts on the simpler stuff.
In Valian’s essay, she details very simple steps she took to ‘cure’ her work problem; she accepted her limitations, committed to focused work for minute periods starting at just 5 minutes a day, and “clocked in” daily with her partner for accountability. While life wasn’t suddenly perfect after implementing these strategies, she reported consistent progress in her work and has gone on to have a distinguished career.
I’ve always seen my Work Problem as a Me Problem. I am inherently flawed. Other People can sit and work for as long as they want, but my brain is broken and I cannot. Reading Learning to Work implanted another idea in my mind. Maybe it’s still my fault, but as well as being a flaw in my very being, there are potentially fixable issues with the approach I’m taking to doing The Work.
Maybe, just maybe, I could be like Virginia Valian and use a simple approach and shamefully low targets to make more progress on the meatier, needle-moving work that I’d previously found such a slog?
This month, I’ve set myself a goal so simple that I feel a tinge of shame admitting it. I’m going to work for 25 minutes a day on the Most Important Thing. That’s it.
The 3 main principles, mainly taken from Learning to Work:
I must do real, undistracted work for 25 continuous minutes a day.
It must be on The Most Important Thing.
To help with distraction, 3 of The Most Important Things are written on a piece of paper, and all windows that aren’t to do with it are closed on my computer for the duration of the work session.
I’ve told my wife to add a bit of accountability.
From an 8-hour day, I’m going to work for at least 1/16th of it. Writing those numbers down make them seem a bit ridiculous. But this is real, unadulterated work. No distractions, no checking, no context switching, no notifications. Just me, The Work and a timer. Timer goes on, and I can’t do anything except work on The Work for 25 minutes. Timer beeps at the end, and I can do whatever I want. If I’m feeling great and I’ve got gaps left in my day, I can go for a second round of 25 minutes. If i’m not or there isn’t, I don’t.
The Work must be on the ‘Most Important Thing’ because that’s usually the toughest thing that has the most impact, and often the thing I want to run away from. "Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all," says Peter Drucker. "It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?" asks Thoreau.
Paper is used to list the task(s) because I’ve found that a mere glance of my (completely over-the-top complex beautiful Notion-based to-do list can become a distraction in itself.
I’ve thrown in telling my wife about the challenge for a bit of added accountability - and a nice serving of shame if I don’t see it through.
I’m 8 days in and I’ve kept it up every day so far. I’m beginning to see that small, deliberate steps can build a platform for meaningful change. Sometimes it feels awesome. On the 2nd day of the challenge, I ripped through 5 25-minute work sessions and even started entertaining thoughts that this concentration stuff is easy and wondering if I might actually be like everyone else.
On other days when my calendar is packed with meetings or I’ve woken up to a big challenge in my inbox, I’ve found it difficult to get started on a single session and ended up having to squeeze it in after I’d ideally like to finish my working day. But they’ve got done.
I’m hopeful. My initial reflections are that the method works, and that in a somewhat childish way, each day I tick off is having a very real positive impact on my self-confidence.
..and with that, I’ve completed 2 work sessions for this evening :)