Dedication Can Be Meaningless Work in Disguise
Advice For Scientists
Sometimes when I’m hearing about the problems my clients face, I vividly remember a moment from my childhood.
I had been told to clean my room — but I didn’t see the meaning in it. To me the room looked just fine as it was: cozy and familiar. After all, it was my room and I knew it was only going to get messy again in the future — so what was the point?
Still, I was given strict instructions to get started, and so I did. I moved a few things to the side, and walked around begrudgingly as I moved little bits and pieces into new positions. I knew to wipe the dust off the piano. But instead of sweeping the floor and washing it, I only sprinkled it with water, as I remembered that the floor would be wet after my mother cleaned our apartment. Because I did not know the steps that would constitute real tidying and didn’t see any meaning in it, all I was doing was demonstrating activity.
I was showing my mom and myself that I was doing the task I’d been set. But of course, it was all show and no results; I was creating activity for the sake of it, but I wasn’t generating any real results.
I had fallen into a mode of behaviour which isn’t only common to children being made to clean their rooms: it’s also common to adults who are putting lots of energy into creating activity around a project without actually achieving results.
Here’s the big lesson I take from remembering that story:
Dedication is often meaningless work in disguise.
When working as a scientist, there is tremendous pressure to project an image of dedication to your colleagues (and to yourself!). You might arrive at your desk early with a large coffee and settle in for a long working day, perhaps investing in wrist supports to assist your typing or noise-cancelling headphones to help you avoid distraction.
Perhaps you’ve become accustomed to working longer and longer hours, taking it for granted that you’ll be one of the last people to leave the office at the end of the day. This has become your life — day in and day out — and it would be almost impossible not to find it stressful and exhausting.
Let’s take a step back and think about this situation rationally. To begin, I’m going to make a statement which might sound direct, but I believe it can help lead to a genuine breakthrough in your productivity (and perhaps your sense of self-worth, too):
A lot of the activities you’re currently doing at your desk aren’t useful. It’s very likely that you’re spending a lot of time procrastinating or being unfocused.
Consider this article an invitation for you to recognize this behavior in your own working life. Be honest with yourself as you think about how you’re usually spending your time when you’re at your desk.
When you’ve accepted how much unnecessary time you’ve been spending, it’s time to start cutting that time down. When you start cutting it down, you’ll immediately begin to feel more liberated and in control of your energy — and this is a wonderful feeling.
Even if it means you finish your work earlier in the day, that is absolutely fine. It means you can attend to the other commitments in your life, including self-care and physical exercise. You can start creating milestones within your work to give you a greater sense of control and organisation, and avoid that ‘lost’ feeling which can creep up when we feel unfocused.
To help even more: break your projects down into much smaller, manageable chunks — especially if these are projects which might take weeks, months or years to complete, which is often the case when working in scientific fields. Schedule mini-deadlines for these project milestones, and give yourself permission to leave the office once you’ve achieved them. Go see your family, your friends, or perhaps enjoy a hobby to relax. You’ve more than earned it.
“Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.” Henry Ford
I’m sure you’ll discover that your productivity increases once you start applying these principles to your own working life, and your sense of stress and overwhelm will diminish sharply too.
Sometimes we feel like we need to generate activity in order to justify our competence — when in fact, this can have the reverse effect. Often by generating more activity, we’re actually creating more busywork for other people in our team or social orbit. That can increase the pressures on their own time, and make them less effective in their own primary jobs. It’s a negative cycle!
This is a form of impostor syndrome, a very common self-perception which can cause or worsen all sorts of negative effects in our personal and working life.
Let’s try a quick exercise:
Imagine that you’re absolutely qualified for your job, and you’re undoubtedly the right person to do the work. Imagine that there’s no question whether you’re deserving of your position. What actions would you take?
I’m betting you’d spend a lot less time justifying your competence to yourself and others, wouldn’t you? And I’m sure you’d feel more focused and empowered to do that work which you knew really mattered.
The impostor syndrome can be one of the absolute hardest mindsets to break. It’s not as straightforward as just adopting a new efficiency method or a new strategy. To break out of this cycle, you might need to fundamentally reassess the importance you place on proving your own value.
“We feel like we need to generate activity in order to justify our competence — when in fact, this can have the reverse effect.”
I don’t want to downplay this — so many of us (especially women) chronically downplay our own value to ourselves. We’re wired to feel an intense requirement to justify our place at work, in a team or on a project. We carry an enormous weight on our shoulders.
I often tell my clients:
You are good enough as you are right now.
And I promise, the same is true for you.
We’re taught from an early age that there’s a virtue in working hard; it shows that we’re committed to our task and aren’t trying to dodge the difficulty involved for achieving a goal. However, it’s easy to fall into a trap: we can end up working much harder than we actually need to, because we believe that achieving the results we want is impossible otherwise.
The problem with working hard for your goals and dreams is that when there’s a solution that seems easy or simple, we’re not even seeing it or we’re refusing to take advantage of it. It’s because so often we believe, deeply, that something needs to be hard in order for it to give us what we really want.
Once we start to shift this perception, we can notice amazing things coming into our life. We might even reconsider ideas we’d previously rejected, because our instinct told us they sounded too easy.
We’re able to become more observant to possibilities and potential ways to make our working life more efficient, and greatly reduce our burden of stress and self-judgement at the same time.
“So often we believe that something needs to be hard in order for it to give us what we really want.”
In reality there are so many options open to you, it’s just a case of letting yourself feel free enough to see them and take advantage of them.
I hope you’re able to keep this in mind the next time you suspect that you’re just creating meaningless activity for the sake of it. Don’t be like me when I was a little girl — if you’re going to clean your room, let’s really clean it.
