It’s not too *much* work that’s driving you crazy

This is directed to the Newer Proletariat Class of the symbolic manipulators, the overachievers who were promised that advanced education was la clé d’or to a life of fulfillment.

Along with being a self starter with a can-do attitude who’s a team player with excellent communications skills and willing to go the extra mile. Whatever that all actually means.

So let’s start with the universal hallway conversation.

How’s it going?
Unbelievably busy.

Important people are always busy. That is why, for example, you can’t corner your boss long enough to find out what, exactly, you’re supposed to be doing. There’s a hint there because you would think that the job of being a manager might involve communicating with one’s subordinates primarily, rather than with one’s peers, if necessary, or, by preference, with one’s superiors. But continuous communication between manager and worker actually only occurs at levels comparable to a labor foreman and laborer.

You are smart enough to know that while being busy is a necessary element of being important, it is not sufficient. It may not be quite clear what elements must be added to busyness, but one thing is for sure: if you are not busy, you must be a loser. Just as being unable to round up 500 remote acquaintances to like you on LinkedIn is evidence of poor networking skills, being not busy is evidence of failing to meet expectations, needing improvement or unwilling to lean in.

So, you must cultivate busyhood. And, since it is not enough to be busy, you must be seen to be busy. No meeting will be too remote from your area of supposed responsibility or expertise that it does not present at least an opportunity to prepare a PowerPoint deck about some imagined future state. Even if appearing on stage is denied you, passing around the material as a handout or emailing around afterwards is nearly as good. Any such meeting is an opportunity to cultivate a reputation as an attentive listener. Listening in an organizational context means awaiting the right moment to speak.

Aside from meetings are the reliable tools of voicemail and email. You will take care to have your phone always roll over to VM to further the image of busyness. Messages can be returned before you go to bed with the faux apology of being insanely busy. Likewise with email. With both channels there are only a small number of people to whom it is important to you to respond to quickly.

Very little substantive content is required to maintain a state of busyness. Most of it can be safely recycled from the trove of recent initiatives and the flood of commentary that it propagates in a vast echo chamber. To this you can add commentary, rhetorical questions, concerns if it appears to be an incipient train wreck and an occasional pro forma offer to contribute some incidental garnish.

Striding purposefully along the corridors is a way to simulate busyness if need be. You can explain this as coordination. I was looking to touch base with Taylor or some such.

Yucking it up should be avoided generally, except with the higher ranking.

Should you be called upon to produce anything in writing it will most likely relate to some desired future state. You will be careful to select assumptions that are consistent with the professed goal, source actual facts to Some Other Dude and add strawmen obstacles that can be overcome with crisp execution but provide a silent I told you so.

The painful lack of beauty in busyness is the time it takes actually being busy or merely faking it. Currently, it appears that 65–70 hours a week is the sweet spot, counting weekends. (Every weekend must include some evidence of busyness.) Your mileage may differ, particularly if you are a Big Law associate or have another job that involves frequent content creation on topics other than what great results should be expected from the latest Five Quarter Plan.

When you do have such content creation duties, it will interfere with the vital activity of busyness. You must either absent yourself or undertake the creative process before others arrive or after they leave, preferably both, including weekends.

The other problem with that kind of activity is that the results will invariably met with hostility or silence (or both). You may hear this is not what I had in mind or this is inconsistent with [the previously unknown] Project Minerva.

While it is always possible to achieve busyness, it is considerably more difficult to achieve innovation (see Machiavelli). Thus the external rewards of content creation are problematic and you should only rely on your own sense of a job well done for any sense of satisfaction.

In the meantime, your workweek has inflated by 25% or more of the most inconvenient hours in terms of consistency with the quaint notion of having a life.

This caricature of a white collar job exaggerates the core features of your situation. You may find yourself well or poorly paid for living a life in this grownup version of high school. You are unlikely to find yourself happy with your lot. Some undeserving ass licker makes more than you. Some bullshit artist gets undeserved credit. Some really stupid self defeating stuff goes down in the name of whatever the latest corporate Love Potion No. 9 is goin’ round.

It’s not like this for every white collar job, of course. Architects and engineers, for example, spend a gratifying large percentage of their time solving problems in the physical world. Their solutions can be tested against a gratifyingly large body of precedent and, eventually, by direct observation. Software writers enjoy a harsh but fair first level arbiter in the CPU that will either execute the instructions given it or crash.

For you in the general run of employees of unwieldy institutions relying on magical thinking to bring about the land of corporate milk and honey, you have only process and method.

Without method and more method, and more system, we are afraid the chaos which is in us will reveal itself. And yet these methods only make things worse.

Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, 1979

You are alienated from your job, in the sense that Marx described for manual workers, because you have too little actual work to do. You may believe that your organization is uniquely fucked in this way, but organizations are fairly consistently alike.

When John Kenneth Galbraith, the acerbic economist, worked at the WWII Office of Price Administration his wife would tease him, what did you plan today, dear? She recognized in his work such a high level of abstraction that it was difficult to draw the connection between daily activity and any concrete observable result. Yet, by war’s end, the absence of inflation provided the aggregate connection and Galbraith considered his contribution as his finest work.

It’s this connection between purposeful activity and final results that had gone too often AWOL.

From worst paid to best paid, I have been able to answer the what did you do question various ways:

• graded 30 essays
• washed dishes for 1,000 students
• classified 4,000 feet of drill cores
• described the effects of dredging a mangrove swamp
• tattooed butterflies
• ran a payroll using a new program
• laid out a runway expansion
• prepared a letter of credit
• held a public hearing
• documented purchases from 15 different sellers
• went to yet another project planning meeting

The last was with a relatively exalted title and the highest remuneration. It was also the busiest and the one with the greatest amount of dissatisfaction.

Go figure.