Great Work / Worrying you've screwed something up
Also: Working less hard / Work bullshit
This week:
Worrying you’ve screwed something up.
Getting more done by working less hard. (Summary of article back from when this was new and most of you weren’t here.)
Work Bullshit Corner: the Enneagram.
Book recommendation: Daily Rituals.
Worrying you’ve screwed something up
Many a restless night I have spent worrying I got something wrong for a patient or a client. It’s a horrible feeling, and those who care about their work are susceptible to it. While these worries may be unavoidable from time to time, they’re manageable.
The answer is not to bury your head in the sand, not to let the worry smolder, but to act promptly. For me that may mean calling a patient to see how they’re doing (they’re usually delighted that I was interested) and perhaps giving some advice I should have given earlier, or running something past someone with more expertise (especially useful for those prone to unfounded worries, and you often learn something), or heading into the hospital in the middle of the night to review a patient I’ve admitted, or speaking to a colleague with whom I’m worrying I may have come across wrong.
The quicker you act, the easier it is to defuse the worry, and the better you’ll sleep. We’re inclined to avoid doing whatever it is we need to do. But the rewards are usually immediate. And, wonderfully, few screw-ups have awful consequences.
(This was about worrying that you may have screwed something up. In a future email we’ll look at how to manage those situations when something serious has gone wrong—as will happen to even the most conscientious of people who’ve been doing work that matters for long enough.)
Why you'll get more done by working less hard
Most people reading this weren’t around for my earliest emails. So, for those who missed it, here’s a short summary of one of my first topics.
How much you get done, and how well you do it, increases when you work harder and longer. But only up to a point. Beyond that optimum, work harder or longer and you’ll get less done, and do it less well.
We’re most of us working harder and longer than that optimum. There’s lots of evidence that this is so.
That means that you can, truly, get more done, and do it better, by being easier on yourself. For example, people are often surprised to find that being more systematic about taking regular, restful breaks immediately results in them working better and more efficiently. Again, lots of evidence for this.
In the full article, I provide eight suggestions for how you can get more done by working less hard.
Want to read the full article?
If you prefer to listen, there’s an audio version here.
My own appreciation and understanding of this has been heavily influenced by writer
’s wonderful book Rest (2016)—a book that tangibly improved my life.Work Bullshit Corner
Great Work focuses on practical advice that actually works, based—where possible—on solid science. But it won’t have escaped your attention that there’s an awful lot of pseudoscience about work, working life, and teams. It’s propagated by well-meaning people—but, if advice isn’t going to work, all it does is leave people feeling that there’s no point trying to improve their working lives. So, here in Work Bullshit Corner we’re going to have an occasional look at dubious work-related advice. And this week we’re going to start with the Enneagram.
The Enneagram of Personality
Heard of it before? Nor, until recently, had I. But it turns out it’s being widely promoted in the shadier corners of seminars, conferences, and writing on work and management as something that helps us understand each other and work better in teams.
The claim is that there are nine personality types, each with things like an ‘ego fixation’, a ‘basic fear’, a ‘virtue’, and a ‘stress point’. Grand language. These nine types are interconnected, as the mystical-looking circle above shows, with ‘triads’ and ‘wings’. The Enneagram claims ancient roots and its modern development was tied up with a school for ‘cosmic consciousness-raising’. (If you’ve had enough of my scare-quotes but want to know more about the Enneagram, try this Wikipedia article.)
And the Enneagram lives in a world apart from science. A recent systematic review concluded that “Enneagram theory remains largely untested”. And, perhaps more problematically, it bears no relation to the now pretty well-established five-factor model of personality that’s the best account of personality differences that we have.
Verdict: bullshit (until proven otherwise, which is unlikely).
And yet … there’s a problem with sniffily dismissing things like the Enneagram. Like the better-known and widely-used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (which also has serious problems), some people seem to find it helpful. And as the Enneagram systematic review noted, “the overall purpose of the Enneagram is not just the identification of one’s type but compassionate self‐awareness that promotes growth”.
What I’m about to say sits uncomfortably with me, but I increasingly wonder whether there may be some benefit even in bullshit theories of psychology or working life if they encourage people and teams to think about who they are and how they work.
If we’re going to do that, though, why add the distraction of pseudoscience? Thinking about who you are at work and how that impacts your working life (which I’ve written about here) is an invaluable thing to do, and at the heart of the Great Work philosophy. And you don’t need an Enneagram to do it.
Book recommendation
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, by
. This is a lovely collection of short vignettes of the working lives of people you’ve heard of: writers, filmmakers, composers, scientists, philosophers and the like. It’s readable, and an insight into how people got their stuff done. Did you know that Jane Austen started her days by playing the piano, or that Mark Twain read his day’s work to his family after dinner each evening?Realizing he’d not written about enough women, Currey wrote a second volume, Daily Rituals: Women At Work, which is at least as good as the first.
PS I’d love to know what you think about this new format—several shorter things instead of one longer article. (Or is there now too much here?) Comment or reply to let me know!
PPS Thank you to those who completed the poll in my last email about two versions of the sign-up page. You made the decision easy.
If you’ve found anything helpful in these emails, it would be a huge help to me if you could recommend them to anyone you think might like them. You can share this email …
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Hi Adam! The problem I have with any of these personality tests is that they put us inside of a box. We are much more diverse and complicated than what the test results say. I always find the questions difficult to answer because there are too many variables. I think they can be fun as a starting point to think more deeply about our traits and pay more attention to who we are.
Hi Adam
This is Sandra Weames here, your cousin in-law. I personally like this format.
Would love ❤️ to have coffee ☕️ sometime