Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.
– Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness
A study published in 2015 by the American Psychological Association reported the two primary sources of stress for Americans were money and work. A follow up poll of almost three thousand adults found that almost fifty percent of respondents had missed work due to work related stress, and sixty-one percent said that work related stress had made them physically sick.
According to the Mayo Clinic, the person you report to at work is more important for your health than your family doctor.
A recent study published by Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer concluded that work is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States.
Work is literally killing us.
The impact of work on our lives has become more clear in the last three months than ever before. The cracks in the edifice of our lives have become chasms through the recent fatigue of social distancing, the anger and grief of racial inequity, political tension and polarization, and the subsequent paralyzing complexity and overwhelm of it all. Life has been rough. We’re navigating the quantum paradox of simultaneously being employee, partner, parent, teacher, and home chef while our dinner tables are also our desks are also our kid’s classrooms.
As I’ve listened to dozens of colleagues and clients speak to the stress and difficulty of keeping up, I’ve noticed some themes emerge. It seems that what recent months have revealed about our lives, and namely our work, is that they are increasingly characterized by fragmentation, acceleration, compression, and expectation. I’ve begun to refer to these as the FACE forces, not only because acronyms make things easier to remember but also because I think all of us are tired of staring at small faces in boxes on our screen all day (there’s some zeitgeist resonance here for sure). Here’s a short introduction to these forces.
Fragmentation – Our days are chopped into 30 or 60 minute intervals, switching between work modes, individual identities, and the obligations of life. Exceedingly rare are sustained portions of time without interruption or time constraints. This fragmentation has serious ramifications on our ability to think deeply about the complexity of our life and work in any meaningful manner, especially in a manner conducive to actually tackling and solving for this complexity. Reflection, contemplation, and focus are needed now more than ever, but only exist in wisps of unfulfilled longing.
Acceleration – Have you ever told a client or a colleague that they need to slow down, take longer, and do less? I have, but it’s never worked. Most of us probably haven’t because there’s just no incentive to do so. Every incentive, social and otherwise in business, is oriented towards faster, quicker, and with more impact (hence, compression). While we’ve all agreed the rate of change in our world is snowballing, we don’t often pause to consider the accelerating tempo of our lives. The efficiency paradigm of our world insists that things be done faster, be optimized, and ultimately be outsourced. So long as we are obsessed with efficiency, acceleration will haunt and taunt us day in and day out. This leaves little room for the slow, the considered, the pause; the beautifully inefficient moments of teaching our kids to bake, taking in the sunset without posting to instagram, and finding slivers of gratitude and contentment necessary for fulfillment.
Compression – Our presuppositional framework for value creation is rooted in efficiency, and efficiency heuristics necessitate that more is accomplished with less. This means the quantity of input and output increases while the time unit decreases – this compression undergirds almost every aspect of our working lives to the extent that taking more time to do less is absolutely heretical, an unimaginable way of doing things. Thus our lives are marked by the constant pursuit of more with less, so much so that there is now such a thing as “micro tasking.” When you begin to look for it you see compression everywhere, hiding in the shadows of multi tasking, chronic partial attention, and the ubiquitous retort of “I’m busy.”
Expectation – In the last week alone, two colleagues have mentioned to me that they were going to work while on vacation. I’m sure we’ve all felt this pressure, or heard the same sentiment from others – ‘I am compelled by the expectation to be responsive and available, even when on vacation.’ This is the expectation we carry – immutable accessibility across an unending array of communication platforms. We check email right as we wake up, still laying in bed, and late into the night, always connected, always available. As we’ve all gone to working from home we’ve compensated even further, with the weight of expectation negating the inclination to take a nap, go for a walk, or help our kids find a snack. The unrelenting demand to be available and responsive is the ball and chain of corporate America.
So what do we do? How should we respond to the FACE forces, the four horsemen of the work apocalypse? The answer is very simple, yet quite difficult to implement – personal autonomy. More specifically, the freedom to choose how one spends one’s time, the liberty to decide how, when, and where to get work done in manner conducive to creativity and the equilibrium of life.
Research going back decades consistently shows that job autonomy–the amount of discretion you have to determine what you do and how you do it–is one of the most important predictors of job satisfaction and work motivation, frequently ranking as more important even than pay. In a study by Cornell University of 323 small businesses, those that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of top down, control oriented firms and had one third the turn over.
More importantly however, research has shown autonomy is a hedge against the FACE forces and leads to significantly healthier, actualized, and more creative people. The ability to have long sustained blocks of uninterrupted time is critical to introspection, contemplative concentration, and the imaginative exploration necessary to know oneself and the world around them in manner conducive to breakthrough ideas. Slowing down, doing less with more time, and freedom from expectation allows for the leisure and idleness necessary for meaningful and fulfilling relationships, creative play, and personal growth. The crux of it all is the freedom to make these decisions – self agency activated by autonomy.
Many have written about the enterprise systems and structures that support this kind of autonomy. Some call it ‘self management,’ others describe it as a ‘flat organization.’ I won’t go into all of that here, though I suggest you pick up copies of Reinventing Organizations by Frederic LaLoux and Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan.
I will however say one last thing; autonomy is not the absence of accountability. We must recognize that we are in this thing called life together. So together, I implore you to say ‘slower’ in a world shouting faster, to claim less in a world pushing more. Be productively inefficient. Consider your own biases and what you believe about people that shapes your management philosophy. Bring these forces up and ask your colleagues and community how they should be addressed. Be a champion of autonomy, and commit to the very foggy path of uncertainty you must traverse to find it. Bring others along. Perhaps together, we can realize a world in which these four horsemen retreat.
Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts – don’t hesitate to reach out with questions, comments, etc – joel@joelfariss.com. You can also follow me on instagram and twitter.
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