Boring Work Is Important (But Not in the Way You Think)
Lack of interest in a task may be a sign that you’ve made a mistake in priorities.
Paul Graham recently wrote about how to work hard. One point, in particular, stuck out to me:
“The best test of whether it’s worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but it’s probably the most accurate one you’re going to get. You’re the one working on the stuff. Who’s in a better position than you to judge whether it’s important, and what’s a better predictor of its importance than whether it’s interesting?”
That resonated with me, perhaps because it offers a refreshing counter-weight to the bulk of my experiences from my formal education as well as much of my early career experience. School — at least the kind of U.S. public-school experience I had — teaches you that how interesting something is does not have much of anything to do with how important something is. In this view, working on boring things is seen as sort of the career equivalent of eating your vegetables — you have to do it because it’s good for you, not because you necessarily enjoy it. There have even been times in my life when I came to interpret boring tasks as a badge of honor — it showed how dedicated I was to my work that I could force myself to slog through something so mind numbing because “it had to get done.”
But did it really need to get done? Does it? Or, as Graham suggests, are there times when boredom with work is actually a strong indicator that the work doesn’t really need to get done — at least not on the current timeline. I want to think this through first using the simpler lens of tasks that concern me and no one else. Then I want to tackle the harder question of how to negotiate and re-negotiate workloads within a team, based on the interest different people feel in the tasks they’ve taken on (whether voluntarily or by assignment).
It’s possible to maintain interest in boring things
It seems, right at the outset, that I’ve used slightly wrong words to describe the situation I’m trying to understand. I’m not convinced that “boring work” is actually a thing, though it may be an acceptable shorthand. Any work can be boring and any work can be interesting, depending on the situation.
Example: I would generally tell you that washing dishes is boring work. My wife and I have a deal that, each night we eat at home, one of us cooks the meal and one of us washes the dishes. (If we end up cooking together, then one of us will volunteer to wash dishes — or will look at the other with sad-puppy-dog eyes and ask wistfully if the other wouldn’t mind taking on the dishes as well just for tonight). Because I enjoy cooking — I use it as a way to clear my head — I often get out of doing dishes, and because my wife likes my cooking (or so she says…), this works out pretty well.
However, there are nights where I not only both cook and wash, but I’m intensely interested in doing both. Maybe my wife isn’t feeling well. Maybe her attention has been necessarily pulled elsewhere. Maybe she happens to have something on her schedule for that night. Maybe she’s just having a bad day. At those times, I see that doing the dishes, even if I’ve cooked dinner, is a clear way to use some extra time and energy I happen to have in order to provide extra support that our household happens to need. When that happens, I’m able to maintain a steady interest in the task of washing dishes, even though the process of washing dishes remains as boring as ever.
So I’m not really talking about interesting work or boring work. I’m talking about the interest I have in a task. And, looking at it that way, I fully agree with Graham that interest is an excellent measure of importance. I find that if I do things that interest me, and don’t worry about doing things that don’t interest me, the important things tend to get done and the unimportant things tend to take care of themselves until they become important.
That’s because everything that could occupy my (or anyone’s) attention is a trade-off. It’s never a question of whether something is important. It’s a question of how important a thing is relative to all the other things I could pay attention to. The ability to decide that something is unimportant enough to ignore constitutes a profoundly critical aspect of human reasoning. It’s an extension of our ability to ignore background noise like fans, lights, and distant traffic. Paying attention to anything means ignoring many other things.
So I’ve found it’s important to distinguish the interest something holds for me from similar-but-still-not-the-same feelings, such as my assessment of how “fun” it will be to do the thing. A thing can be not fun, but still interesting. A thing can be downright painful, but still interesting. As long as I remember that, interest is a good heuristic for deciding what deserves my attention.
Sometimes it’s dumb to work through the pain
All of this becomes much more complicated when you’re not 100% in charge of deciding what tasks you’ll take on. Particularly in an early startup, where your number of employees is in the low double-digits or below, you have little choice but to impose a strict division of labor from day to day and practically no division of labor over time. No one gets the luxury of defining their job in terms of a finite set of clearly-scoped responsibilities that can be expected to stay more or less the same for the foreseeable future, and no one gets the luxury of duplicating effort. That practically ensures that most people are going to spend a lot of their time doing things other than the things they’d most like to do.
But remember: interest in a thing isn’t the same as enjoying that thing or finding it fun. In a work setting, I find that interest is very closely tied to clarity: the more I can see the expected payoff that comes from doing a thing, the more interest I have in doing it. Maybe I can see how doing the task will clearly make a specific customer happy. Maybe I can see how it will position us in a specific way for sales and investment conversations. Maybe I can see how it will enable a specific new functionality I’ve wanted to offer, or fix a specific weakness in our systems. The clarity drives my interest.
In a startup, we often lack clarity. I know this is true in my work designing algorithms and data systems, but I don’t think this is a data science problem. I don’t even think it’s particular to startups, but I do think the problem surfaces much more visibly in a startup environment. When I work on a task on which I don’t have clarity, I’m doing so because someone — usually someone other than me — has a belief (that they can’t fully articulate) that the task is important.
The reason I’m doing that unclear thing instead of it being done by the person who actually wants it done, is because the thing requires skills that I have and they don’t, or because I happen to have a small opening at the moment to take on new work while they have none, or both. It’s reasonable that I should take on that work, even if I don’t find it interesting, and even if doing the thing delays my ability to work on things that actively interest me.
But what if, after persistently trying to work on the thing, I just can’t bring myself to focus on it? What if I can’t keep my mind on the task at hand, and can’t keep my mind off other tasks?
That, I believe, is a signal. And I believe it’s moderately detrimental to me and strongly detrimental to my company for me to ignore that signal.
Cooking isn’t the only thing I do to clear my head. My exercise of choice involves stressing my body either by punching heavy bags or lifting heavy weights. In either case, I often end up quite sore 24–48 hours after I work out. I’ve found that one of the best remedies for post-workout soreness is working out again: if I can warm the sore muscles up a little, get them moving even though they don’t want to move, they start to feel better.
Sometimes, however, either through over-exertion or, more often, employing bad technique, I’m sore not because I exercised my muscles but because I strained them. In those cases, working through the problem doesn’t solve the problem. When I try to work through strain as if it were regular soreness, I end up in even more pain, and I usually have to stop exercising for long enough that it derails my regular habits, which derailment then ripples into other aspects of my life. If I’d recognized the pain as a signal instead of an obstacle, I would have been better off.
It’s critical to separate work from work ethic
Sometimes lack of interest in a task is a sign that there’s an underlying problem. The biggest challenge to getting that problem addressed is that you usually can’t explain why the problem is a problem — you only know how you feel. That makes it tragically easy for others to dismiss your concerns.
Given those realities, it takes courage for someone to say they’re having a hard time maintaining interest in a task they’ve taken on. Courage should be rewarded. If someone says they have an interest problem, it creates an unproductive environment to respond with phrases like “well, we all have to do things we don’t like,” or “I think we all need to be willing to do hard things,” or “I’m sorry, but it needs to get done.” That last one is especially dangerous.
Because maybe it doesn’t need to get done. At least not right now. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to maintain interest in the thing.
There are all kinds of situations in modern-day businesses where a problem is recognized as a problem, even if it can’t be fully articulated. If an employee reports that another coworker consistently makes them feel “uncomfortable”, it would clearly be both foolish and wrong to assume that the reporting employee just has a thin skin, or is reading too much into the situation. To take a less fraught example: if the engineer implementing a pipeline said “something in these outputs just doesn’t smell right; I think we have a bug,” it would usually be a mistake to say “well, I feel fine about it, so I think you should just press on with the work.” In each case, the person reporting the problem is doing so because they are best situated to notice a problem if there is one. It’s dumb to ignore your best-positioned sensor.
A report of a problem — especially an ambiguous report — is a signal that you need to investigate further. It’s an opportunity for discussion and clarification. To treat it as anything less than that minimizes the person’s concerns, which denigrates them as a person, but also puts your company at risk by choosing to believe that a problem doesn’t really exist, rather than doing the extra work to confirm or refute the problem’s existence.
Lack of ability to maintain interest in a task is almost never a work-ethic problem. Often, however, it is a work problem — an indicator that you’ve made a mistake in priorities. That’s an opportunity to reassess those priorities, and perhaps correct them. Even if you end up keeping the priorities as they are, the reassessment will often provide the clarity the person needs to understand why the task is really important, which will often help them maintain the interest they need to get the task done well and efficiently.
Boredom is an opportunity
Prioritization is a tremendous challenge for any business, and it’s especially challenging for startups. The interest you and your team are able to maintain in various tasks you undertake contains a wealth of signal about how you should revise those priorities. Of course, you won’t always be able to make use of that signal. Sometimes you won’t have enough time, or patience, or presence of mind to unpack the boredom and find out what it contains. However, if you never make the time, never force yourself to have the patience, never cultivate the presence of mind, you’ll probably build slower than you can afford to build, and almost certainly create a culture where your team feels they are not rewarded for looking for opportunities or challenging conventional wisdom.
Growing up, my siblings and I, like many kids, resisted eating our vegetables. My mother, bless her, had five children, zero time, and — by her own frequent admission — a desire to cook that hovered around negative-two. So our vegetables were often boiled or steamed until they were almost mush. That obviously wilted our interest in eating them. But we had to eat them. We couldn’t leave the table until we ate them. If we had dessert, it only came after vegetables. So my siblings and I buried those vegetables in butter, salt, and sometimes even sugar to make them less boring. By powering through our lack of interest, we arguably were exposed to worse nutrition and formed worse eating habits (my brother still won’t eat squash without an equal amount of brown sugar on top of it) than if we hadn’t eaten the vegetables at all.
Sometimes, building a startup is like feeding a family — there are things we think we need to do, even if no one wants to do them, so we just try to make those things work as best we can. And sometimes, like my mother did, we lack the time or the experience to consider alternatives. I’ve learned that it’s a mistake to assume that the hard thing sitting in front of us is hard because it’s worth doing. Sometimes it is. Sometimes — in fact, often — it’s hard because it’s not worth doing. Doing it anyway can, at best, waste valuable time and, at worst, build up priorities and cultural habits that lead us in the wrong direction. Boredom could be one of the best tools we have to figure out what to build, and how to build it. It’s not an obstacle. It’s an opportunity.
Schaun Wheeler is a co-founder at Aampe, a software company that empowers mobile apps to proactively present users with direct connections to the things they want, when they want it, on an individual basis. Schaun is both an anthropologist and a data scientist, and has worked across the security and intelligence, travel, investment, education, advertising, and user experience industries. And he recently wrote a children’s book to explain his company’s algorithms. You should read it: https://www.aampe.com/blog/a-user-story.
