Shave

A gem is hewn from the rubble
Like my face is removed of its stubble

At once it will never occur to me
What this life ought to be
Trampled and walloped
I persist to move on
Through the shades of gray
Towards some unseen paragon
Why do I do it
Why should I speak
A word utters silence
A soul utters meek
A lonesome traveler
Woed to the bone
Drifting and dreary
And wearily... alone
Finding no solace
In pleasures I see
Finding no pleasure
In being just me
Finding no finding
Until findings forgot
What a whithering binding
This blinding I've got
Until something stirs
And unearths the jewel
Inspired by fire
I must have that tool
That could fell a weak spirit
And bring life to dead
I want to be near it
Fantastic un-dread
But I fear I can't follow
So with sorrow juxtaposed
I am the whimpering whining
God only knows
And what of the tool
fit to divine in me
I'm inclined to remind myself
it was never meant to be

A gem is hewn from the rubble
Like my face is removed of its stubble

The Dust

A see a speck in the air
Speck come, come down from there
Come down here, the ground awaits
And so my feet, my head contemplates

But if a wind comes and carries you away
Remember this, onerous Speck
You will fall one day.
And my feet on the floor, they do await
Kicking at gravel 'til it is clay
A Rotten Rogue Art Recluse
Speck, you madden me

Come down, Come down
Come down, Come down

I cannot wait anymore
To trample you underfoot
Your insensient existence
Your home is the soot

Piles and piles of you on the ground
All of you fallen so I may abound
But with all of your little speck friends
afloat in the air
for my foot to step forward
my brain just wouldn't dare
To have Speck eyebrows
and teeth
and I detest Speck hair

So come down Speck
Come down from the air.

Obliterating Work Avoidance

Here is the crux of the procrastination problem. I'm sure that there are added psychological components worthy of discussion, but the core of the issue lies in this: we don't love what we are doing, and haven't searched hard enough to get to do what we love. Some of the procrastination problem arises from not being honest with ourselves about what we love and don't love, but that just shows how deviant of a problem this love quest can be. Anyway, good article. Well thought out, and it passes the test of "it makes sense". My final thought has to be, what do I love?



January 2006

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.

And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.

The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.

Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn't just do what you wanted.

I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later. [1]

Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.

Jobs

By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.

The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.

Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do. That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from. Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.

What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."

Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.

The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. [2] Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. [3]

It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren't identical.

The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.

If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.

Bounds

How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.

Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.

It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.

I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems with procrastination. You'll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.

So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.

I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow. But it probably wouldn't start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven't had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.

Sirens

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4]

This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.

That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.

Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.

Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.

The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really like.

The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?

This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect. Most good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs as math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end of the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver: people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies, and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs. Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.

The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. It seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors and whose parents want them to be novelists. The kids think their parents are "materialistic." Not necessarily. All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences.

Discipline

With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.

It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don't underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it—finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems the exception. More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A, drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after taking it up on the side.

Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.

Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible. [6]

It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."

Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do work they love—that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs. Really? How do you make them? In the US the only mechanism for forcing people to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn't been invoked for over 30 years. All we can do is encourage people to do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.

If there's something people still won't do, it seems as if society just has to make do without. That's what happened with domestic servants. For millennia that was the canonical example of a job "someone had to do." And yet in the mid twentieth century servants practically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have just had to do without.

So while there may be some things someone has to do, there's a good chance anyone saying that about any particular job is mistaken. Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no one were willing to do them.

Two Routes

There's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love" that's all too true, however. One has to make a living, and it's hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that destination:

The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don't.

The two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money to work on things you do.

The organic route is more common. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work. A young architect has to take whatever work he can get, but if he does well he'll gradually be in a position to pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this route is that it's slow and uncertain. Even tenure is not real freedom.

The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you work for money at a time. At one extreme is the "day job," where you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what you love in your spare time. At the other extreme you work at something till you make enough not to have to work for money again.

The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.

The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over obstacles. The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are walls of varying heights between different kinds of work. [7] The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music. If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you have more freedom of choice.

Which route should you take? That depends on how sure you are of what you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how much risk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in your lifetime) for what you want to do. If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.

Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.

A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including, unfortunately, not liking it.

Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.

When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information. Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are like. At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobs offer internships, and those that do don't teach you much more about the work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.

In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media. So unless you're fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job career. That was probably part of the reason I chose computers. You can be a professor, or make a lot of money, or morph it into any number of other kinds of work.

It's also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like. Conversely, the extreme version of the two-job route is dangerous because it teaches you so little about what you like. If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll quit and write novels when you have enough money, what happens when you quit and then discover that you don't actually like writing novels?

Most people would say, I'd take that problem. Give me a million dollars and I'll figure out what to do. But it's harder than it looks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.

Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there.





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Notes

[1] Currently we do the opposite: when we make kids do boring work, like arithmetic drills, instead of admitting frankly that it's boring, we try to disguise it with superficial decorations.

[2] One father told me about a related phenomenon: he found himself concealing from his family how much he liked his work. When he wanted to go to work on a saturday, he found it easier to say that it was because he "had to" for some reason, rather than admitting he preferred to work than stay home with them.

[3] Something similar happens with suburbs. Parents move to suburbs to raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dull and artificial that by the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced the whole world is boring.

[4] I'm not saying friends should be the only audience for your work. The more people you can help, the better. But friends should be your compass.

[5] Donald Hall said young would-be poets were mistaken to be so obsessed with being published. But you can imagine what it would do for a 24 year old to get a poem published in The New Yorker. Now to people he meets at parties he's a real poet. Actually he's no better or worse than he was before, but to a clueless audience like that, the approval of an official authority makes all the difference. So it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.

[6] This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of that.

[7] A more accurate metaphor would be to say that the graph of jobs is not very well connected.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Dan Friedman, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, David Sloo, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this.

Empathize With Work Avoidance

I wonder what this random activity check is? Sounds like it could be useful. What really attracted me to this article is that the dude sounds just like me; he's read David Allen and he's got some of the same setbacks. Check this out:

"The problem now is that while I now know what I'm supposed to be doing I'm still having a hard time actually doing any of it. I haven't quite nailed down why that is. Some of it is my natural tendency (or long habit (what's the difference?)) towards avoiding work. Some of it is that I don't see the value in a lot of the work I'm supposed to be doing."

So I know that the problem is not mine alone, however, that realization does not solve the problem either.

Ah well.

June 21, 2004

Work avoidance

Back awhile ago I read David Allen's Getting Things Done. I've been toying with his organization system and while it hasn't changed my life at this point it has led me into some changes that I think are for the better.

At work I spend all day every day working on a windows pc with the company-mandated Outlook as my mail client. Allen has contracted with a company to produce a plugin for outlook that facilitates the stuff-processing methodology he promotes. I gave it the 30-day trial and decided to buy the software (despite the outrageous price). It adds the concept of projects so that you can associate tasks and emails and appointments with a project. It lets you take an incoming email and decide whether it's actionable; if it is, you can morph it into a task (with the original message saved and linked to it for reference) or an appointment (hardly ever valid in my case).

In practice the system is working like this for me now:

• login and find a box full of email
• make a fast pass deleting or filing everything that's not actionable
• make another pass answering everything that I can give a quick response (Allen says under 2 minutes. I'm using 5-10 otherwise the overhead of creating tasks would make me crazy.)
• finally make tasks out of everything that's going to take more time
• box is empty

So that's pretty groovy for the intake phase of the process. After working like this for about 6 weeks I've currently got a list of about 40 outstanding projects (things that take more than one step) plus a couple dozen other single tasks. I'd like to say that that's everything, but there's a bunch of stuff hidden off in our bug-tracking system that I haven't taken into this system yet. Anyway, it's not as bad as I thought it might be.

The other thing I've added to my stable is another outlook plugin called Lookout. I've often repeated a joke I heard somewhere that goes "why is it that google can search the entire internet in under a second, but it takes outlook half an hour to search my mailbox?" Lookout is an okay answer to that question. It's an indexed search engine for your mailbox. It rebuilds its index periodically in the background so whenever you want to search you just type in your keywords and bang you have a list of messages that match. It's not as good as google at guessing which ones are the most likely since it doesn't have the rich linking context that google enjoys in the web, but it's way better than the builtin outlook search tools.

Between those two tools I now have much higher confidence that I actually know what's lurking in my zone of control. I'm much more able to see the array of things I'm putting off and so I don't have that gut-clenching feeling that there are things I'm forgetting about.

So far so good. The problem now is that while I now know what I'm supposed to be doing I'm still having a hard time actually doing any of it. I haven't quite nailed down why that is. Some of it is my natural tendency (or long habit (what's the difference?)) towards avoiding work. Some of it is that I don't see the value in a lot of the work I'm supposed to be doing.

Some of it is that it's much easier to read blogs than figure out how to do my stuff. For that and some other reasons I've moved my entire blog roll into blogrolling.com to make my usual timesuckers a little less accessible. That killed half the day ;-) Probably won't help, either, but I wasn't happy with the old organization anyway.

Maybe I need a tool that will let me register my work-avoidance programs and administer some form of reality check (popup? beep? electric shock?) if I seem to have spent too much time using one of those programs.

This reminds me of the random activity checks in the experiments conducted by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that led to his books Flow and Finding Flow. Maybe I should go read those again.

I wonder if anyone has written a Palm app to do random activity checks? If I was going to use one I'd have to get a new palm with a vibrating alarm cause I can't hear my Palm beep.

Got a problem? Need a new gadget.

Maybe I'll just go back to Getting Things Done and remind myself what's supposed to happen once you've got everything in the system.

Posted by jeffy at June 21, 2004 06:29 PM

Embracing Work Avoidance

Because no argument is truly complete without its counter argument on the table, I present to you the ponderings of Hugh Holub. While his course of action is not recommended for people who want to feel good about their work, he certainly makes a good point. If your desire is not to escalate through the ranks, become better and better, then why not just persist as an unrecognizable entity within your company. I wish that someone would do a study on unnoticeability and job retention/job security. What do you think the findings would show? I'd say that people who are looking to just get by would do just that, get by. Of course if you work for Google, well...

Thanks Hugh Holub.

http://www.bandersnatch.com/avoidwor.htm

HOW TO AVOID WORK

The practice of work avoidance is one of the highest arts of employment. Anyone can get the job done, so to speak. But not everyone can spend 8 hours a day at their work station and get absolutely nothing accomplished.

Avoiding work is one of the surest ways to retain a job. If you complete your work, they'll give you more, until they run out of things for you to do, and then they'll downsize the company and eliminate your job, because you've finished it.

Therefore, you must always avoid work.

(1) LOOK BUSY: The successful work avoider must look busy, as opposed to being busy. Looking busy involves motion. Getting up, sitting down, moving papers around your desk, opening drawers, closing drawers, opening mail, sorting mail -- all are busy-looking functions with no productivity.

(2) FIGURE OUT THE CHAIN OF COMMAND: A very valuable activity for yourself (but not your employer) is to make a chart of the chain of command in your organization. Even if your employer has a chart, this will not accurately display who has the real power, so make your own.

(3) WRITE MEMOS: Writing memos is one of the least productive things a person can do, as no one actually reads memos. Write a memo to everyone of higher rank than you (on the organizational chart you've spent 6 months making).

(4) READ MEMOS: Many people are actively avoiding work by writing memos in any organization. You can avoid spectacular amounts of work by reading all the memos on your desk, instead of initialing them and forwarding them to someone else.

(5) LEARN COMPUTER PROGRAMS: Many employers will let you take classes in computer software--even if they don't use it in their companies. In fact, most companies have no idea what software they use, so you can book up on PhotoShop, and FrontPage even though you are an accountant.

(6) RUN THE COFFEE POT: The most important job in most offices is the Keeper of the Coffee Pot. This person makes the coffee, and then constantly checks on it to make more coffee, clean out the pots, stock up the cups, refill the sugar containers, and so on. In an office of at least 10 people, this can be a full-time job. However, if you are a new employee, the Keeper of the Coffee Pot will have already been chosen. Therefore you must either get that person promoted, fired, or kidnapped.

(7) WATER THE PLANTS: Many offices have lots of house plants, but no official house plant care company. Take over caring for the plants. Again, this is a position usually occupied by a seasoned work avoider, so the position can only be taken by force.

(8) BECOME THE NETWORK MANAGER: If you are in a smart office which doesn't allow coffee pots or house plants, doubtless there will be networked computers requiring a network manager. You do not have no know anything about computers--few network managers do. Since maintaining the network in an operational condition is impossible (especially if you are truly ignorant of computers) you can spend weeks debugging systems to no useful effect.

(9) TAKE OVER OFFICE PUBLICITY: Every company has a newsletter, with important news about births and death among the employees and who has what for sale. Generally this is a job no one wants to do, which makes it perfect since it requires no skill and produces nothing of lasting value. Also, no one will criticize what you do, as they are afraid they might end up having to do it.

(10) CREATE YOUR COMPANY'S WEBSITE: Many companies do not have website, and think this is magic. Create and maintain your company's website. You will spend endless hours of fun accomplishing absolutely nothing useful for your employer, but you'll get a lot of email.

BACK

Copyright 1997 by Hugh Holub

Avoid Work Avoidance

It's too late for me to use this technique now, but it's something I can use in the future. The key to being successful, in anything, is handling things on the front end rather than on the back end. That's really just it. At this stage of my life I have to learn to incorporate that philosophy, but I also need to learn to handle loads of work accumulation due to not handling my work on the front end. My greatest weakness is that when I get overwhelmed I shut down. As if I only have one speed, or one effort level, that can not be exceeded. I've been thinking on that lately. I've got to figure out a way to store away a reserve batch of energy, dedication, and desire for those times when I have to do a little more work. I think I could do it if I knew it would be only for a short time. But I'm so horrible at differentiating between work loads. Well, now it's in writing, and that is hopefully the first step towards a new level of effort towards change, and indeed that old elusive bugger, change itself.

Thanks Mr. Oltion.

http://www.sfwa.org/writing/strategies.html

50 Strategies For Making Yourself Work

by Jerry Oltion

Copyright © 2001 by Jerry Oltion

Work avoidance is one of the major paradoxes of the writing profession. Generally, writers want to write (or want to have written), but all too often we find ourselves doing anything else but. We'll mow lawns, do the dishes, polish silverware--anything to keep from facing the blank page. At the same time we know we eventually have to get to work, so we come up with all sorts of strategies for forcing ourselves to the keyboard.

Sometimes a single strategy works beautifully for an entire writer's career (for instance: for over 40 years Fred Pohl wrote four pages a day no matter what, after which he was free to polish all the silverware he wanted), but in my own case I've discovered that any particular strategy only works for a couple of months before I learn to subvert it. As a result I have to keep inventing new ones. I've come up with quite a few (some of which I've stolen from other people), which I offer here for anyone who cares to try them. They're not in any particular order, so don't feel compelled to work your way down the list. Just try the ones that seem interesting, and remember that some of them won't work for you at all. Also, while some of them are mutually exclusive, most of them aren't, so you can mix & match all you like.

*

Set a quota of pages written per day. Make this realistic. The
object isn't to prove anything to anybody, but to give yourself a
reasonable goal to shoot for, one you'll actually be able to hit
every day. If you go over it, that's cool, but all you have to do
each day is hit the quota. The catch: Extra pages don't count
toward the next day's quota.

*

Set a quota of hours worked per day/week. The same applies here as
with page quotas. Make it realistic.

*

Write a story or chapter a week.

*

Promise your sweetie a steady supply of bedtime stories.

*

Pay yourself an hourly wage for time worked, and don't allow
yourself leisure activities (movies, dinner out, etc.) unless you
can pay for it with this writing money.

*

Have someone else pay you for writing. Use the coin of whatever
realm you happen to be in: someone else cooks dinner when you
finish a story, or a friend buys you a cookie, or your significant
other does that kinky thing with the chocolate syrup.

*

Write to music. Put two or three CDs in the player and stay at the
keyboard until they're done. Crank it up. Boogie a little. That's
not just background noise; that's the sound of you working.

*

Lighten up on yourself. Give yourself the freedom to write when
the urge strikes, and not write when you don't feel like it.
That's one of the attractive things about the popular conception
of the writing life, right? So enjoy it!

*

Hide your wristwatch in a drawer. (Meaning: reduce your dependence
on the clock. Let your inner circadian rhythms tell you when it's
time to write and when it's not.)

*

Set a timer for a short period of time (15 minutes or so) and stay
at the keyboard--no matter what--until it dings. Then do it again.
Only allow yourself to get up after the timer dings, and always
set the timer again if you stay at the keyboard. This will hold
you in place long enough for the first impulse toward
work-avoidance to pass, and you'll often discover yourself eager
to keep going when your time's up.

*

Schedule your day's activities--and schedule writing hours
/first/. This doesn't necessarily mean putting them first in the
day, but putting them on the schedule itself first, so they get
priority. Schedule everything: bathing, eating, sleeping,
telephone time (outgoing calls, at least), walking the
dog--everything. Then, if it's not on the schedule, don't do it.
Schedule it tomorrow.

*

Form a support/nagging network of other writers.

*

Graph your hours and/or pages against those of your support group.
Post the graph where you can see it when you write. Also post it
where you can see it when you /don't/ write.

*

Challenge other writers to finish a story a week, losers to buy
dinner (or dessert, or whatever) for winners.

*

Generate story ideas mechanically. Roll dice and pick characters
and settings from a list. Tumble a desktop encyclopedia downstairs
and write about whatever it opens to when it lands. Throw darts at
your bookshelf and write a homage to whatever you hit. The goal
here is to demystify "idea" as a stumbling block. Ideas are a dime
a dozen once you learn how to find them. Become a supplier rather
than a consumer.

*

If you've been sitting on an idea until you think you're good
enough to do it justice, do it now! You may be run over by a bus
tomorrow. Even if you aren't, by the time you think you're good
enough, the passion for it will be gone. Write it now! Write all
your good ideas as quickly as you can after you get them. Don't
worry about getting more; they'll come faster and faster the more
you write. Before you know it, you'll be begging people to take
them, like a gardener with zucchini.

*

Outline. Plan everything you're going to write, scene by scene,
all the way through to the end. Do your research while you're
outlining, so by the time you start writing the actual story,
you're already living in that world. With a detailed enough
outline, the actual writing becomes a matter of choosing the right
words to describe what you've already decided to tell. You can
concentrate on style and let the plot take care of itself, because
you've already done that part.

*

Don't outline. Don't plan ahead at all. Feel the lure of the blank
page. Trust your instincts and dive into the story, and don't look
back until you're done.

*

Keep written goals, and revise them daily. (Production goals,
/not/ sales goals, which you can't control.) Rewriting them every
day helps you focus on each one and think about what you can do at
the moment to further it along.

*

Unplug the TV for six months. This is a tough one, but it's the
one with the biggest potential for shifting your priorities over
to writing. You can gauge your need for it by your resistance to
it. If you can't imagine giving up your favorite programs in favor
of writing (or if you're more faithful to your viewing schedule
than to your writing schedule), you should probably remove the TV
from the house permanently; but no matter what you do, give it six
months, minimum, before you even look at it. Turn the screen to
the wall. Seriously. What's more important to you: your writing or
TV? Find out.

*

Turn off the talk radio. Same as above; if you can't give it up,
you're making it more important than your writing. Even if you
think you need it for background noise, substitute some other
noise that doesn't engage the language center of your brain.
That's for writing, not for listening, when you're at the keyboard.

*

Remove all games from your computer. This is just as vital as
reducing your dependence on TV or radio. The key to all these
suggestions is to reduce the amount of time you spend on
unproductive stuff. If you play games to relax, put them on
another computer in a different part of the house, and play them
outside your writing time.

*

Ditto the above for email and web surfing. Don't allow yourself to
do it until after you've done your writing for the day. If you're
really addicted, allow yourself to read only one email message per
paragraph written. Don't count paragraphs shorter than 50 words,
either. I don't mean add up all your short paragraphs until you
get 50 words--I mean don't count paragraphs shorter than 50 words
at all. Write until you get one that's at least 50 words long. So
what if you're in the middle of a stretch of dialog? Keep writing.
(And if this email-as-reward system works for you, join a busy
listserver!)

*

Reward yourself for success. Choose the reward so you'll work hard
to earn it.

*

Read a book a day (for inspiration).

*

Keep 5 (or 10 or whatever) manuscripts in the mail at all times.
Choose a number that'll make you stretch a little, but one you can
realistically maintain.

*

Use every spare moment to write something, even if it's just one
sentence. An extreme version of this: don't plan any official
writing time; just use the spare moments in your day--but use them
/all/.

*

Carry a note pad or tape recorder with you wherever you go. Use it
to record ideas as well as the actual text of stories. Make it
your external memory. The idea here is to keep yourself focused on
writing no matter what else you're doing.

*

Keep more than one project going at once. Switch to another the
moment you slow down on one.

*

Collaborate. You'll be less likely to slack off if someone else is
counting on you to perform.

*

Switch tools. If you normally use a computer, write with pad and
pencil for a while. If you normally write hard sf, write fantasy.
Get out of whatever rut you might be in.

*

Change your writing environment. Rearrange your study, or go write
in the library or a cafe for a while.

*

Keep yourself constantly "on." Start another project /immediately/
after you finish one, before you even get up to stretch your sore
muscles.

*

Don't think; just write. Keep the writing and editing processes
separate. Don't worry about clumsy bits; you can fix those later.
If you're writing on paper, intentionally cross out a few lines
and re-write them so you won't have to worry anymore about messing
up the page.

*

Edit for perfect copy as you go. This one works for some people,
but not for others. If you find yourself getting too critical of
your new material, stop editing during your creative time. But
some people discover that they build up momentum editing, and when
they get to the end of what they've already written, they're eager
to forge ahead into new territory.

*

Write an hour for every hour you read.

*

Spend an hour a day in the library researching new ideas.

*

Rewrite a story a day. (Works best if you've got a lot of unsold
stories lying around.)

*

Jump-start your creative juices. Start your writing day with a
long walk in pleasant surroundings, or gardening, or doing
something else that wakes you up and gets your mind working.

*

Identify your best hours of the day and write during those. Let
other people take the leftovers for a change.

*

Paper your study walls with /Playboy/ foldouts (or whatever else
is likely to keep you in the room).

*

Evaluate everything in your life according to Maslow's hierarchy
of needs. Air is at the top. Food and shelter are close behind.
What's next? Sex? Money? Where does writing fit in /now/? See if
you can move it up a couple of notches. Write now, breathe later.

*

Give yourself regular days off. Most people get weekends off; why
shouldn't you? An important point: Days when you tried to write
but failed don't count as days off. Only days you've scheduled in
advance count. Conversely, now that you've got regular days off,
don't use your work time for personal stuff.

*

Take up a hobby. A lot of writers started writing as a hobby, and
it slowly became their passion. That's cool, but it left an empty
niche in your life where the hobby used to be. Find something else
to fill it. You'll be amazed at how much you realize you missed
that kind of thing. More to the point: you'll suddenly stop
resenting your writing for not fulfilling that need, and you'll
start to enjoy it for what it is.

*

Turn writing into a hobby. Not everyone has to be a full-time
writer. If you don't want to (or can't) write full-time, or if you
can't find another hobby that scratches the particular itch that
writing did when it was a hobby, then make it one again.

*

Hack-write. Put words in a row for pay. Write anything you can get
a contract for, so long as there's money in it, but here's the
kicker: do the best job you can on it. Even if it's something you
don't care about, do a good job anyway. You're practicing two
things here: writing on demand, and writing well.

*

Build a ritual around writing. Start well ahead of the actual act
of writing, and continue the ritual after you've finished work.
The idea is to make writing an integral part of a bigger picture.
Let the cat out, make a cup of tea, feed the fish, put on some
music, light a candle, write, check the mail, fix lunch, do the
dishes. Doesn't seem quite so ominous when it's buried among all
that other stuff, does it?

*

Light a candle. Make it a big, wide one. Write until the wax pool
is entirely molten, as far out as it will go. Anything less will
"core" the candle, wasting wax as the wick burns itself downward
without using the wax from around the edge.

*

Binge! Gear up for a major writing weekend. Get your ideas ready,
set a goal, and plan to work every waking hour until you're done.
Cook meals ahead of time and freeze them so you can just nuke 'em
and keep going. Tell your friends you'll be out of touch. Turn off
the phone ringer and put a message on your answering machine
telling people to send the cops if they really need to talk to you
that bad. Lock yourself in your study and don't come out until
you've committed fiction.

*

Chain the wolf to the door. Buy expensive things on credit, quit
your job, etc. JUST KIDDING! (But I tried it once, and it worked,
too … for a while.)

/This article is Copyright. Reproduction and distribution specifically
prohibited. All rights reserved. Reprinted here with the author's
permission/.

This page was last modified on Tuesday January 04 2005.

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Posted By Mr. Hernandez to Text eMissions at 4/28/2008 08:14:00 AM

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Posted By Mr. Hernandez to Text eMissions at 4/28/2008 08:22:00 AM

To the Death (of doing what we ought to be doing)

These guys are brilliant. I only wish that I'd had the idea... and that
I could draw.

Ok, they begin with the "Finish Him!" head removal. Not bad.

Moving right along to the ultra high frequency vertically oscillating jab.


Now we're getting somewhere. This guy is toast.

What battle would be complete without a competition of strongest
radiation blasts.

Great hair, guy on the left, and lady on the right, save yourself.

I like to imagine that these guys had gone to school to study, only to
find a classroom door open. Inside were the requisite chalkboards,
erasers, and--what great fortune!--colored chalk. As they entered the
room their book bags slid off of their shoulders and, without attention
or concern, hit the floor. Mouths agape, they hurried to engage in what would be remembered as a battle for the ages.

Nothing Happens

I'm supposed to be writing up a bunch a papers for grad school and lesson plans for this week. It's not happening; I'm avoiding it like the plague. This happens to me once in a while--perhaps twice or three times in a while--where I just get out of work mode, and for the life of me I can't get back in. I feel this weight on my chest and you'd think it would cause me to do what I ought, but no. I just go along, putzing around as if tomorrow will never come. But when it does come, it brings hell along with it. Is it bad to know precisely what is going to happen and yet let it happen anyway? This is my world.