The Blind Pursuit of Speed Will Eventually Leave Businesses Behind
I have always said that I am bad at time. I have no idea when something happened in the past, or how much time I have to work on something due in the future, even if I can see a key date on a calendar three weeks out. I just don’t think about what that means. Instead I have always tried to fill my time, taking opportunities as they come and focusing on the things that are in front of me, especially if that means not focusing on myself.
One time, when pressed to create a chart explaining a creative idea that was reliant on a specific cadence, I made a graph with time progressing downward, on the y-axis.
“Why down?” everyone laughed.
“Because time contains an unstoppable gravity,” I responded, knowing it was really fucking annoying the moment I said it.
The pandemic has given most of us a kind of time disorientation. In addition to creating a plethora of personal changes, business environments have been in a state of upheaval over the past couple of years. Yet traditional notions of work productivity have pressed on. Continuing the pace of business as usual has created a kind of mental disorientation, which has become a sickness for many. I believe the corporate addiction to speed over human value is the culprit.
The pandemic era accelerated change across every aspect of our lives. But the deterioration of our collective mental health may be one of the most profound and long-lasting. At least 4 in 10 Americans reported signs of anxiety or depression during the coronavirus pandemic, up from 1 in 10 in 2019. Drug overdoses rose by 30% in 2020. And life expectancy fell worldwide, with the biggest drop occurring among American men, losing an expected 2.2 years of life due to the pandemic.
The unprecedented nature of the pandemic caused a flurry of doing, even if what we were doing was running in place. For many of us, it meant entering a kind of robot-mode, where we applied learned psychological patterns and shortcuts from our past, and put them into overdrive in the pursuit of Getting Shit Done, despite distress. Uncertainty and dread loomed large. So many of us turned to what we considered to be personal agency, even if the tools we had developed were not relevant answers to our problems.
Increasingly, neuroscientists argue that we can take advantage of our brain’s inherent neuroplasticity to change our emotional responses to “the ups and downs of life.” Unfortunately, the pace of business has only reinforced negative thought patterns for many people facing challenging situations— And our obsession with speed and productivity as a metric of business success has ballooned in an era where managers can’t physically track their employees. Nevermind checking in on mental health or contentedness or personal well-being — these are assumed to be largely personal issues distinct from work — plus we are all miserable right now anyway, right? Pandemic ennui is not considered to be a business’s problem.
Most businesses don’t place employee well-being as a top driver of successful business performance. Instead, the business world continues to model an ethic of “Don’t feel, just do.” This had certainly been my personal mantra, even if it wasn’t my business’s philosophy. I spent all my non-working hours blotting out all feeling with one numbing agent or another, and relied on my precious number of “good hours” everyday for labor-centric steadfastness. Of course, I eventually broke.
The absurdity of pushing productivity in most office jobs can be summed up by one question: what exactly are we measuring? In large, multi-faceted organizations, the answer certainly can’t be purely profit. Especially for knowledge workers, the idea of a measurable productivity is profoundly absurd, an Industrial Revolution-era metric that was created for measuring the number of tin cans made on a production line over the course of an hour.
These are important questions we should all be asking: How do you measure a knowledge worker’s impact? And how much of our output at work should we actually measure? How much of our work time is consumed by “low-value” tasks that we end up prioritizing because they make us feel “productive”? And who is to say what is low value, and what is high value? And where does a sense of personal well-being and wholeness come into play?
In this excellent Op-ed for the New York Times, writer and academic Jonathan Malesic writes about the structures of work and the role jobs play in fostering an increasingly broken sense of personal identity. He actually calls into question the very notion of extracting meaning and purpose from work.
As with most things, I don’t think that an extreme, conclusive declaration is the right one: I believe you should find meaning in many areas of your life, which ultimately Malesic mentions. Instead of condemning all work as a soul-less driver of deteriorating mental health, my gut says to favor a path of inquiry over assertion, which tends to place us in more of a possibilities mindset. In this case, the question that’s interested me for years in this one: How can a job create expansive value and meaning, both personally and collectively? And do the two have to be at odds with one another?
This is a central thesis of our working culture at Zeus Jones—what happens when we create a work environment of personal growth and well-being, balanced with a collective drive to make positive social impact through business? How can we make it possible to balance the pursuit of both?
Many of us left other careers because we felt what we were doing didn’t actually matter, and we were killing ourselves doing it. We were successful, ambitious people who wanted more meaning from our work lives, and we were guided by an optimism that business didn’t have to suck; instead we believed that businesses could actually serve people for the better, both on a micro and macro scale. Admittedly, for a bunch of high achievers, it’s incredibly easy to slip into a mindless hustle mentality. Often in a rush, this is the default.
Ultimately, what the pursuit of speedy productivity does is glorify fast thinking. This is fine for awhile — we all do this to survive and cooperate and participate in the social fabric of work. But when it comes to mental health, speed removes the time we need to feel and discern, and it reinforces potentially unhelpful patterned thinking we have about ourselves. In other words, speed can deepen thought patterns, rather than generate new ones. Many neural pathways are useful ones. They are what have gotten us to where we are today. But these patterns also make us resistant or incapable of the change we need when big social shifts occur. Work is always going to be a give-and-take, and it should be, as long as the give is balanced with the take. What speed doesn’t help us accomplish is feeling and discernment: what actually matters here? This is especially critical if our personal thought patterns are way out-of-whack. Loneliness only intensifies the imbalance. And often it’s the individual who suffers before the collective.
In the post-pandemic era, what most of us need is connection — to ourselves and to others — and a deepening of our relationship to the things that matter to us. The social internet is a great facilitator, but it’s only truly good at forcing us into abreadth of shallow interactions. What it’s proved to be completely shit at is helping us connect deeply. The ethos of the social internet has extended to the platforms we use for work; many of these have become transactional dumping grounds that use the same addictive psychological tricks as most social platforms. If you’re a person susceptible to addiction, work can easily become another area of your life that you can’t get enough of, even when the obsession is making you incredibly ill.
Many psychologists agree that connection and belonging are the foundation of a good life. So why aren’t we prioritizing this more in our work, where so many of us spend so much time? Often, it’s because the simplistic path of productivity is too alluring, and it’s assumed to be the backbone of what work even is. The word “work” is derived from labor, after all. But as with most things, short-sighted profits over long-term considerations often have many negative, unintentional side effects.
Getting shit done at work isn’t a flawed idea. It’s necessary to create change and progress. But when it comes at the cost of relationships, or at the cost of ignoring your own feelings or needs, we are no longer people — we are machines. And if I’m willing to forcefully assert anything about modern life, it’s that people are terrible at being machines.
We must rethink the value people bring to work as well as the way work happens. They are indivisible. Ultimately this is a complicated systems problem. But it starts by slowing down, which is necessary to be thoughtful and responsive to what we’re sensing and feeling.
No single business, big or small, can shift the course of our collective work destiny — the reality is that we’re part of a massive ecosystem that needs to evolve. At Zeus Jones, we’re starting with small but important steps. One of those is condensed meeting hours, a reduced set of time where everyone is bookable for meetings. Of course, connecting outside of these hours — both with yourself and others — is encouraged. Just feel it out.
The irony in the quest for speed and productivity is that the biggest, most sustainable economic opportunity today lies in finding a more regenerative model of work that grows people and, in turn, their value. Yet what we see is many businesses digging in their heels, reinforcing outdated work expectations that rely on a cannibalizing mode of labor extraction.
Shifting to a model of regenerative work that makes us better people is the answer — because we’re quickly entering an economy where humanity will be a business’s greatest point of differentiation. Any business that doesn’t follow suit will eventually be left behind.
