Jargogled Impressions.

Earlier in September, a private conversation between Elon Musk and the Twitter CEO Parag was released as part of the ongoing drama between the company and the mercurial GOAT entrepreneur of our generation. The phrase “What did you get done this week?” bore the maximum cultural imprint with the social media watchers – subtly hinting at the low product velocity that Twitter has for long been accused of, and highlighting the tension between managing a public company as a ‘regular’ CEO versus focusing on the cosmic, inter-generational progress at the behest of Musk. Background of all this is was the spam accounts that Twitter is finding it hard to eliminate from its platform with no discernible progress. But the the exchange quickly became a meme – a token of cultural insight, that let to a wide ranging commentary on making progress at work versus indulging merely in busywork.

Every activity in the human domain can fall prey to the perils of ‘busywork’. Busywork refers to our efforts and hard work that effectively does nothing other than fill up time. For example, big corporates are notorious for creating a lot of tasks for professionals – this happens because as companies scale, their leaders feel the need to rely on business processes to ensure things don’t slip and commerce happens as intended. Leaders tend to rely less on trust to drive delegation and more on processes to drive ‘management’ of tasks. Over time, these processes devolve into more of busywork and less work as the workforce balloons and available work auto-stretches to fill the time being rented from these employees. Folks who realize this soon enough and identify themselves strongly with their day jobs mostly move on to smaller companies, their impatience trumping over their inertia. Others tend to find meaning in the nooks and crannies of their work and divert their attention to ‘work-life balance’ or develop sociopathic tendencies and climb up the ladder – deriving meaning from this relentless activity of climbing.

But it does not need to be so on the individual, atomic level. Individually, we can relieve ourselves of busywork through a careful design of our environment, a recalibration of our mental model of how we define ‘work’, and a lot of active energy.

Designing an environment in which your work accrues towards something is key to ensuring you don’t slack off. Relying on systemic constraints to steer yourself is your best bet against distractions and mindless scrolling. A first step towards designing such a system is to create an inventory of the work items that you deem to be busywork. These could be across busywork conversations (more on this here), busywork chores, busywork entertainment, busywork reading, busywork scrolling, busywork relaxing, etc. The appendage busywork is to denote the items that don’t solve what it’s named after – if you are pretending to relax and not taking active measures to do so effectively then it’s busywork. If you are reading but not really learning anything new, then its busywork. In many cases, busywork arises from a memetic desire which places us squarely in the Freshishtan realm and pushes us to indulge in busywork to sustain and feed the monster.

Once you make an inventory of these items that plague your day-to-day life, you need to form a plan around sensing, identifying, orienting, deciding, and acting to avoid the busywork. OODA loops work not just in dangerous and life threatening of company altering areas – they can also work easily in the more mundane task of organizing your life.

Sensing and identifying requires a conscious understanding of the attributes that define busywork – takes time, drains you off energy, nudges existential questions, seems repetitive and Sisyphean, you won’t miss it when it’s gone, etc. Once you identify, you must orient yourself literally and figuratively to brace for impact. If you are busywork reading, then you must either give up the task and move to something else, or you must take stock and understand what’s driving the behavior. Taking active notes, writing down what you have read so far, or explaining it to someone will likely be advantageous in these situations. If you are ‘busywork talking’, then stop right there and pivot the conversation to something valuable and more useful. Valuable conversations are rare but finding meaning in all conversations is not as it really depends on your ability to do it versus relying on someone else for a rendezvous.

Decide is the act of deciding on a strategy for the next time when such situations arise so you can be better positioned to handle it. Decide is also deciding on the mitigation approach that best works for your current situation by taking into consideration your energy level, your interest, and your context.

Act is the ultimate act of defiance. It’s the capstone to your analysis and without it the whole exercise will obviously fail. So, act according to your decisions and then live to tell the tale. Act to prepare yourself from busywork either through eliminating them, or by discharging them with prompt abandon. Do these things for instance:

• Know that busywork is busywork and that its created by people like Michael Scott (ala The Office) to account for people’s time
• Know that busywork never gets your anywhere; busywork is optics work by a different name and nothing that it involves gets you ahead and even if it does, said growth is a fool’s errand
• Busywork runs against the idea of asymmetric impact; in fact it deliberately blocks the impact you can create by taking you away from making real progress on things that matter
• Create templates for unavoidable busywork – recognizing the need as regular 9am-5pm 401(K) addicts
• Batch similar tasks together for lower cognitive overload and context switching and faster processing
• Change of scenery == new ‘creative’ ideas
• Time box these sundry items and dispatch them with the worst of your abilities. Deliberately do a bad job at it
• Be aware of your priorities and be rigid with your priorities and be super detailed with your priorities and be super anal about your priorities. Be everything you can possibly be for your priorities
• Learn to say “no” to useless tasks – it’s okay to slack off and relax if that’s what you want to do instead of moving that mountain which does not need to be moved

Arguably, the last item is the most important one however may not be realistic in the context of working in big organizations that are heaving under the weight of imaginary urgencies, structured firefighting every week, or meaningless processes that serve no purpose other than to satisfy the sociopathic overlords. The “learning to say no” requires a fundamental shift in your mindset and one that does not come easy. A good starting point, at least relevant for me, is to know that I am not saving the world through my actions but I can still make a small difference with the little things. This can help me say no to my interest areas that are so far removed from my immediate reality that focusing on the wrong aspects of them can be busywork at best. A work that’s needed versus wanted is by design not useless. Taking decisions is taking ownership and taking full responsibility for your choices. Things only get interesting when we are taking ownership and committing. Skimming the surface is the trademark of busywork. But we must do well to remember that what starts as meaningful work can devolve quickly into a clutter of processes that helps you evade the hard parts in the name of moving ahead.

Finally, we come to the energy you have and can invest in to make busywork go away. Entropy loves busywork because it does not care for your outcomes. So it’s easy to fall prey to busywork – take busywork conversations for example. Not falling prey to it requires keeping a constant alert mode, at least for the time it takes for it to become second nature. But until that moment arrives for you, it’s going to take a lot of cognitive and physical energy to avoid it. Over time though, the effort required reduces as you build the muscle to extricate yourself from such busywork situations.

I leave you with this: “Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.” ~ David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A theory.