The Campbell Academy Blog (66)

The counter-intuitive nature of work limitation

One of the things I turn to when I'm overwhelmed and struggling is the writing of Oliver Burkeman.

Oliver Burkeman wrote 'Four Thousand Weeks', but he also has a blog, which you can subscribe to here.

I thoroughly recommend that you subscribe to that blog, as it only comes out infrequently, and it's always utterly brilliant.

Some of his recent writing has centred on what it feels like to him when he is overwhelmed. Although he has an enormous amount of autonomy in his life (he is effectively a freelance writer), all of the principles that he talks about are absolutely applicable to almost anyone.

Latterly, Burkeman has been discussing the concept of the four-hour workday, which is something that has been discussed in lots and lots of places.

It is, in fact, the essence of allowing people to work from home.

Clocking in at 9 a.m. and clocking out at five with an hour for lunch does not guarantee that someone will provide eight hours of high-quality work.

The first problem with that is defining what high-quality work actually is.

This applies to all of us who have the privilege of looking after a team of people, but more importantly, it applies to ourselves.

You will never get to the end of your to-do list, regardless of how much time you give yourself, and that is the first point that you must remember when setting the amount of time that you're going to work.

You will always get to start unless you put real barriers in place to avoid that, and you will always get distracted at certain points.

Working on deep work in short periods, which allows you to get in, get work done and get out, is probably one of the most effective ways to get remarkable things done.

Many of the most successful writers and authors of all time-limited their writing to either the morning or the evening or a specific time of day each day and just turned up time and time again.

This week I found myself in an extraordinary position where I had four work-from-home mornings, but I knew full well that I would never put 16 hours of work into that 16 hours.

I also knew that I would put way more than 16 hours of value.

The stuff that I was able to create, and the thing that I was able to do intellectually, I would never have been able to do if I was just grinding it out, trying to get to the end of a meaningless to-do list.

The best thing you can do with the overwhelm is set yourself a limited time of work to get as much done as you can in the best possible way, and then stop and then do something else, something that you like, or something that nourishes you and something that adds to your social collateral instead of adding to your financial collateral.

Understanding that even if you did 16 hours a day or even 24, you would still never get to the end of that to-do list (your list will only expand with every job you actually do).

Understanding that gives us the freedom to realise that there is only so much that we can achieve, and we can focus our attention on the things that really matter.

I'm writing this at the end of a Wednesday morning when all I really got done was a two-hour bike ride (early in the morning, not wondering whether I would make it, but I actually did) and then some lecture planning and task-setting for other people in important areas of work, followed by two long conversations with each of my daughters separately.

I look back at my to-do list, and I didn't score as much off as I wanted, but I've got two more sessions this week, and I feel ready to attack those in the best possible way to 'make up' for the time that I lost, not sticking my nose onto the grindstone.