Stop Giving All Your Fucks About Your Job
This afternoon, a friend sent me this interview with medium contributor Sarah Knight. She just wrote a book, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck: How to stop spending time you don’t have doing things you don’t want to do with people you don’t like, and it. looks. amazing. She talks at length about not giving so many fucks about your job, including an article she wrote about quitting hers.
I am all about this idea, and you probably should be too.
The Ideas of Success and Productivity, and How Many Fucks We Give About Them
The idea of traditional success is treated as the be-all-end-all in our culture. This normally relies on three metrics- wealth, respect, and fame. Let’s break it down: wealth, respect, and fame all come from external sources. Other people have to give you these things. Therefore, success as it’s normally defined must be given to you. It is an outside measurement of your worth.
This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with wanting that kind of success. I want it. In some corner of our minds, most of us do. We are human, and we want other humans to like us. We want to be treated well.
Often, to get that validation in Western culture, you have to be productive, which means if you want to be successful, you must use all of your fucks to do as much as you can. And that’s the problem. It leads to burnout at best and complete self-loathing at worst. When we focus on that outside validation to the detriment of what we think of ourselves, especially relating to traditional ideas about success and work, we find ourselves doing very little that we actually give a fuck about: wearing uncomfortable clothes because they’re fashionable, talking and smiling with people we legitimately hate because they are validating, and working in a building that we want to set on fire because the job pays well.
Caveats
Like Sarah, I have been incredibly lucky. I don’t have a formal education in my field, but I am making money, enough that I can think about my career in terms of what doing what want to do versus doing what I need to survive. Those of us who fall into this category are incredibly fortunate, and we shouldn’t ignore that. (We also shouldn’t condescendingly pity anyone who isn’t, but that’s a different post altogether.)
Example: If you aren’t able-bodied but are working, you often don’t have the fucks left over for anything else. With external demands, cycles of over-exertion and burnout are sometimes impossible to avoid, and taking care of your physical body comes first in these situations. Self-actualization has to be less of a priority for some of us. Keep that in mind, and be gentle with yourself and others.
My Experience With Giving Too Many Fucks
My monetary career revolves around productivity. I’m currently a conference coordinator, virtual assistant, and consultant on productivity for brilliant but unstructured individuals. I think a lot about how to get more done every day. I go through at least one standard-size Moleskine a month with color-coded lists, notes, and graphs. (Yes, graphs. Feel free to judge.) I can talk about the merits of different productivity systems until you want to bludgeon me into a coma. I knew what organization system Sarah was going to reference before I got halfway through the introduction.
What I’m saying is that I know my shit, and with knowing my shit, I’ve seen a lot of people who give too many fucks about things they don’t actually care about. For instance, I could talk to you about how to optimize a conference call, but how much do you really, in your heart of hearts, give a fuck?
It’s a slippery slope that’s far too easy to fall into. You start giving a few more fucks about your presentations so that you can get that raise, and six months down the line you’re somehow giving all of your fucks to Keynote. Or you start networking to look for another position, meet some people who can help you out but you despise, and the next thing you know you hate all of your fucking friends. It happens to the best of us.
I’ve fallen down the too-many-fucks rabbit hole more times than I can count. In the past, I have been obsessed with the concept of being successful, of being at the top of my field, of being the superlative. The leftovers of being an over-achieving kid are still there, and I want to be the best. It’s not all about being externally successful, of course. I also love what I do and want to help others make meaningful work, but sometimes I get caught up in the traditional definition of success.
The most recent bout of giving all of my fucks to my job was catalyzed by the decision to move. The goal is to be in a new city by my birthday in early March, and I need cash to meet that. After setting that deadline, I began scheming on how to boost my bank account and get noticed in my field. I spent a few weeks reading interviews, talking to other freelancers, scribbling down ideas, and working my ass off with current clients.
The other areas of my life suffered. My partner saw me when I crawled into bed and occasionally when I asked him to make me dinner because I hadn’t eaten that day. I didn’t talk about anything other than bullet journals versus to-do apps. I stopped making art. It was bad.
How I Stopped Giving All of the Fucks To Work
Like most of the important changes in my life, it started with a friend giving simple advice and it finally gelling in my mind. I have a habit of not internalizing certain information until it’s said at the right time by the right person. My dear friend Todd Crow and I were talking about, surprise, business, and he told me, “you have a finite amount of energy each day. You can’t get any more done in a day than you already are.”
This idea of finite energy is true of all of us. We only have a certain number of fucks for 24 hours. All of mine were being used for work, and I couldn’t make more fucks magically appear. (This is also discussed in the Spoon Theory analogy, originally developed by Christine Miserandino.)
Everything clicked back into place: my values, my passions, my sense of self. I remembered what I gave a fuck about beyond work and took the afternoon off.
Professionally, what I try to focus on is tweaking how we think about productivity. The way we use that word has to change. It’s not about the quantity of things we finish in a day but about how much we actually enjoyed our day. We need to focus on: 1. prioritizing the passions that matter to us, and 2. the quality of the work we produce relating to them.
This type of productivity doesn’t necessarily center around a career. If you love your job and it’s everything you want to do, congrats! But most of us, even those who enjoy their nine-to-five gig, don’t fall into that category. We all have to make money to survive, but we don’t have to give each and every fuck we have to that goal. We absolutely do not have to sacrifice all of our time and all of our fucks to work, and we should set up boundaries to stop that from happening.
When was the last time you sat down, stopped thinking about work, and focused on what you really, truly love doing? It doesn’t matter how long you spent on it; what matters is that you did at all. Some work schedules don’t give you much down-time, or maybe you need most of it to recover. That happens. The idea, though, is to give some time to that passion. Use half of your lunch break to draw. Get a speech-to-text app and brainstorm your novel on your drive. Get a book on music theory and read it on the train.
This is absolutely easier said than done, but think about your fucks in terms of phone battery life. Do you want to dedicate all of that energy to answering emails, tapping away at your screen, getting angry about typos and autocorrect, or do you want to spend some of it working on an app relating to something you’re passionate about? Find even 10% of your fucks, and use them outside of work.
I couldn’t agree with Sarah more on the basic concept, but it needs tweaking. For her, quitting a nine-to-five was an option, but it isn’t for most. It is possible to allot more of our time, energy, and (sometimes) money to the things we love. Take some time, find where your fucks are going, and prioritize. I fucking believe in you.