Jet Lag

One very minor upside to the social distancing quarantines we've been under for two weeks now:  I can find time to start writing again.

Week three of social isolation is underway, a long enough time that I can start to draw some conclusions about my "old" life.  I already wonder if I will ever go back to a daily driving commute--this walk up the stairs after breakfast is a lot less stressful than a typical Atlanta rush hour, and my productivity certainly hasn't dropped and might even be higher.  Most of my work days are spent on the phone and computer anyway, and my department is spread across the country, so it should have been predictable that remote working isn't that much different from office working for me.  (I'm lucky that my kids are old enough to be self sufficient at their home schooling, and that I have a wife who doesn't work outside the home and keeps the household running flawlessly.)

On the unpredictable side, I have been most surprised to find that I'm sleeping each night much better than I was before the lockdown.  Not more, necessarily, but better, deeper, more restorative sleep.  I have changed nothing else in my diet or routine to deliberately chase sleep; I would have though I was sleeping soundly before.  But the difference is enough to be noticeable, and I've been reflecting on why this could be.  The best idea I've had is that it corresponds to the sudden shutdown of my usual peripatetic travel schedule.  Is it possible I had been living in a steady state of jet lag?

I was not regularly jet-lagged in the traditional sense of my body clock being off by a few time zones.  Most of my business travel takes place in my home EST time zone or the neighboring CST that is one hour behind.  But what my travel lacked in distance was perhaps made up for in frequency:  according to Delta, I flew 83 flight segments in 2019, which is over 40 round trips.  Thanks to the fact that my home airport, ATL, is the busiest in the world with direct flights to dozens of cities, I am fortunate to frequently be able to make day trips for meetings.  Sometimes I might have two days like that in a week; occasionally they will be back-to-back so that I get home late one evening then get up early the next morning and head straight back to the airport.  Sometimes the return flights are late, so that I get to bed an hour or two later than normal.  In between trips, there are regular work days and kids activities and social outings, etc.  Many of us know what this business (or "busy-ness") looks like--and many have it worse than I do.

For three weeks now, all of this has come to a sudden and complete halt.  No rushing around, no extra  activities, no flights.  Instead, our family has settled into a fairly steady routine, with fairly regular meal times, a little outdoor exercise each day, and to bed at about the same time every night.  Some of what we've lost in outside socializing we are making up with family time together, playing games and watching movies.  And presto, I'm sleeping more deeply than I have in years.

My conclusion:  I was jet lagged--not so much by actual jet travel, but by the incessant activity that seems to be the steady state operating model for most American professionals and their families.  I wasn't always crossing time zones, but I was compressing and shifting my perception of time through constant motion of mind and body.  Now, without all that rushing around, my mind has finally caught up with my body, I'm sleeping better, and I feel great.

So here's what I'm contemplating as I sit at home:  in two weeks or two months or whenever the social distancing protocols begin to relax and "normal" life begins to restart, how far back to the old ways will I allow myself to get?  I can't, and don't want to, stay sequestered at home forever--monasticism is not for me, and I'm too young to retire.  But is there a point somewhere between sheltering in place and the restless rush of relentless motion that would find me contributing fully to my job, home, and community, while still allowing me to sleep very well at night?  I wonder.

Chasing Two Hares

Our quote of the day comes to us via Gretchen Rubin at The Happiness Project, and falls under the category of ancient wisdom for modern times:

"He who chases two hares will catch neither."
 -Publius Syrus

I've written before about the false promise of multitasking, the seductive idea that we can do more in less time by doing two (or more!) things at once.  The truth, unfortunately, is that our brains aren't wired that way.  Modern brain research continues to discover that human attention cannot be divided and still perform at the highest level.  We are fooling ourselves if we think we are boosting our output by multitasking.

Publius Syrus figured out in the first century BC what our modern scientists are explaining in detail today:  if you want to catch two hares, you have to start by catching one hare.  Chasing two at a time will not get you to your goal faster.

Have a long to-do list?  Pick the most important item that you can do right now, and do it.  Then move on to the next one.  Don't be tempted to do more than one thing at a time--you'll get more done, and what you do will be done better, and you'll be happier for it.

More to Life than Work

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Emily Esfahani Smith tells about how her mom's advice to collect a boyfriend as well as a degree while at college proved to be the right advice.  While the assertion that meeting a partner while in college is easier than in the post-college yearsbis interesting to discuss, I thought Ms. Smith's more important point came somewhat later in the essay:

There is far more to happiness than career success.

Ms. Smith is blessed to have learned at a young age what many of us discover more slowly over a much longer time, often after it is too late to save a marriage, or participate in a child's milestones:  there is more to life than work.  A successful career can certainly be one important component of a happy life, but it is never the only component, and often not the most important one.

For women especially, Ms. Smith points out, a lifetime of being told you can achieve anything often translates into pressure that you should achieve "everything", whatever that means.  But in truth, says Ms. Smith:

Career success and relationships are both undoubtedly important to women's happiness, but many young and ambitious women value their personal lives more than their career aspirations. And that feeling intensifies over time.

I'm hardly qualified to explore the various feminist arguments for or against her point, but I'm glad she made it because I think it offers a worthy reminder for all of us, men and women, to not get stuck with a one-track life that never leaves the career track.  By all means be proud of your professional accomplishments, but never forget that a "personal life" is much more than just achievement--it is the people you choose to spend time with, and the relationships you develop with those people.

What is your main complaint?

I traveled to Chicago for meetings last week, and had a couple of hours free before they started.  I walked down the street from my hotel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, and there was introduced to a South African artist named William Kentridge, several of whose works are currently on display.  Kentridge makes animated films by drawing in charcoal and pastel on large sheets of paper; he then makes minor changes to the drawing, photographing each iteration and turning it into a film.  The effect is something like the the flipbooks of animated stick figures that we used to draw as children, except much more elaborate and much longer.

I was particularly struck by one film titled History of the Main Complaint, created in 1996 during the initial hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was formed to publicly air the crimes of apartheid.  In the nearly six minute film, Soho Eckstein, a notorious South African mining magnate, lies ill on a hospital bed as doctors crouch over him to determine his illness.  When they look inside him, they discover scenes of apartheid's atrocities for which he is guilty, both directly and indirectly as a result of his race and class.  Only when Eckstein acknowledges his own role in perpetuating the crimes of apartheid does he regain consciousness.  (You can see a bootleg version of the film here to get an idea of how the drawings turn into film.  If you are in Chicago, I recommend a trip to the museum to see it yourself.)

It is a powerful film just considering the main message of reconciliation after apartheid.  But it was thought-provoking to me on a second level because of the other images that the doctors saw when the examined Eckstein, a prominent businessman:  the office equipment--typewriter, seal press, and other machines that indicate that Eckstein was pursuing profit at the expense of all else.  Part of what allowed the horrors of apartheid to continue as long as they did was that it was profitable for the ruling class to allow them to continue.  The mighty businessman failed to see how his apparently unrelated pursuit of profit was contributing to the horrors of the world around him.

A question popped into my mind, an American businessman in 2012, as I watched it:  what would Kentridge's doctors find in me if they examined me?  Surely an iPad would show up, and the latest iPhone, and a Blackberry, and maybe a computer, and what about a copy machine?  How easy it is to get caught up in the rat race of work, career, money, status, and power and not realize the effect it is having on those around me.  Happily, there is nothing on the scale of apartheid going on in Georgia right now, but what if I were to consider just the family and friends around me each day.  When I stare at one of my screens while they try to talk to me, what message does that send?  When I spend an extra hour at work, who is really losing out?   What are the unintended consequences of my quest for status and achievement?

We have to work for a living, and it is good to try to do our best at what we do.  But beware the effects of pursuing relentlessly the world's definition of success.  You are more than what you do (unlike Eckstein, as Kentridge draws him).  There is more to life than achievement; it is not the edifices of stone that you construct at work that will support you in the end; it is the soft and tender moss of relationships and memories that you form with those around you that will endure, comfort, and strengthen you.

What would Kentridge's doctors find if they looked into your life?

Time Tracker

I work for a generally benign employer that overall treats its employees well. This year, however, has seen the introduction of an insidious new tool that all employees are required to use that I find highly offensive: Time Tracker.

Time Tracker is an online tool to track employees' time off, i.e., time away from work. As of this year, I am required to enter a "request" for not only my vacation days, but for holidays as well, measured down to the hour. A few moments after I enter my "request," I receive an email graciously informing that my request for time off has been approved. Thanks, benevolent employer! (To be fair, my company also provides two paid days off per year to every employee for community service activities, which is admirable.)

The mandatory use of Time Tracker bothers me in several ways. First, the implication is that all my time belongs to my employer, and they graciously will allow me to have a set number of hours a year to myself, subject to advance approval. This is a slave mentality more suited to nineteenth-century farm workers than to twenty-first century knowledge workers. In my mind, Time Tracker should be reversed: all my time belongs to me, and I am willing to grant some of it to my employer, subject to my prior approval.

Second, I am a knowledge worker, whose output cannot be measured in hourly increments like a factory worker and who therefore is not paid by the hour. I have agreed to perform certain responsibilities in return for a set salary. There is no meaningful way to measure my output in any given hour, and my work can be done in or out of an office. Consider: if I have an idea in the shower this morning, that I incorporate into a client presentation while on my computer at the coffee shop this afternoon, that enables us to win the client's business tomorrow, how many hours have I worked? What was my output per hour? Who knows? Who cares? The truth is, I do whatever work I need to do whenever I need to do it to fulfill the responsibilities I have committed to do. Time Tracker belittles that commitment.

Third, the introduction of Time Tracker sends me the message that my employer doesn't trust me. I have to account for my free time by the hour, but not my work time. Where was Time Tracker last week when I was at the office from 8:00 am to 8:30 pm trying to get a deal closed? If I take the afternoon off to play with my kids but field a call from a client during that time, am I working or not? Before Time Tracker, these conundrums didn't matter; I believed my employer trusted me to do the job when and where it made sense. Now, it seems my company is telling me, we don't trust you after all: you need to account for (and get prior approval for) every minute you are not working. It's silly.

Finally, the email from HR explaining why we are adopting Time Tracker is a model of corporate doublespeak. It says using Time Tracker "allows us to help team members make their work-life balance a top priority." (Really? It seems like trusting me to get the job done whenever and wherever I want to would be a lot more helpful for making work-life balance a top priority.) Using the tool also allows us to "accurately account for time." (Hint: buy a watch. It works for most of us.) And, for managers, incorrect time balances for their employees can "adversely affect your [department] budget." Time is money! Watch out for those lazy employees trying to steal it!

Time tyranny like this invites subtle forms of rebellion: long lunches, the occasional unrecorded afternoon off (horrors!). I decided to rebel by entering my annual allotted paid time off in the first days of the year. So, it looks to the system like I was gone for the whole month of January. Won't someone be surprised when they see my revenue results for January--how productive I was while not working! Maybe they'll encourage me to take more months off........

The WiFi Made Me Do It!

Overheard from the seats behind me this week as our plane taxied to the gate:

"Wifi on planes has killed my reading time. I used to really enjoy catching up on newspapers during flights. Now I just have to work."

I wasn't bold enough to turn around and ask the question that immediately entered my mind: Why? Yes, Wifi is available on many flights now, but it is not mandatory that you use it, or at least it hasn't been on any of the flights I've taken. You are still perfectly free to use plane time to catch up on your reading (as I do), or even to to be delightfully "unproductive" by watching the TV shows or movies on offer on many flights, or sleeping, or staring out the window. Perhaps the gentleman behind me works for a slave-driving boss who tracks when employees are on flights and expects them to maintain email access during airborne hours. If so, the gentleman needs a new job.

But before we cast too many stones at my hapless fellow traveler, we must recognize that his mistake in logic--"if I can work on a plane, I should work on a plane"--is a mistake that we have all made in general form to varying degrees. Just one example: for those of you old enough to have been in the work force before about 1999, think back to that time. Did you spend your evenings at home reflexively checking your Blackberry for emails from your boss? No way! And yet now, because we have can have email access 24/7, it has quickly become standard operating procedure that we should use that access.

Never mind that a high proportion--80%? 90%? 95%?--of our emails are either junk, or cc:'s that we don't need to see right away, or non-urgent administrivia that could easily wait until the next day or the next week. No matter--I email, therefore I am! I'm in the flow! I'm important--look at all this work!

If I may offer a gentle reminder: since those pre-1999 low-tech days, the number of hours in a day has stayed steady at 24. Therefore, all that time you now use to stay in the flow has come from somewhere else. What have you given up? Reading on planes? Exercise? Time with your spouse? Time with your kids? Hobbies?

Technology is a great tool. But its use is not without cost. You are still responsible for how you choose to spend your time; don't say the WiFi made you do it. Be deliberate and choose wisely, because each minute can be spent only once.

Snow Time

So life in Atlanta has returned to its normal frenetic pace following last week's snow induced shutdown. Beginning with heavy snowfall on Sunday night, followed by freezing rain and sleet all day Monday, and combined with public services ill-equipped to handle icy roads, and you had the U.S.'s eighth-largest metro area completely shut down for three days, and mostly shut down for a full work week. The kids loved the bonus week of winter vacation, and I confess to not being completely disappointed that my first business flight of the year was canceled.

It was interesting to observe that although my office was shut down for most of the week, no one seemed to notice. Our company did not melt down; clients from outside Atlanta did not call frantically wondering what was happening; the few truly important calls and memos got done from home. On a normal day we fret about being 15 minutes late to return from lunch.....yet it turns out we can miss a week and hardly anyone notices. I'm not sure what to make of that point yet, but I am certainly thinking about it.

The Technology Double-Edged Sword

USA Today last week ran an article describing the blessings and the curse of technology-enabled work at home. It turns out that the advantages of working at home are not quite so clear-cut as it first seemed they would be, and that there are clear trade-offs to being always available.

As we have written about before on Present Tense Living, the problem is one of boundaries. Technology blurs the distinction between working and playing, and for most people, who rely on their work for income and fulfillment, work will nearly always win in the conflict between the two.

The article makes clear the distinction between time and attention. Your Blackberry may enable you to be home earlier or more often, but if your attention is on your device instead of your spouse or children, then what is the point? The picture of a houseful of individuals each surfing their own screen, oblivious of the others around them, is a sad one. "Home alone together" we might say, and it seems silly when we describe it, but how often have you been in a room with your loved ones but unaware of them as you tapped away on a screen? We think we can multitask, but we are only fooling ourselves and cheating those around us.

Technology enables us to work anywhere, but it does not relieve us of the responsibility of setting our own boundaries. You still have to determine when you are going to work and when you are going to play. If you need to work a lot, fine, be conscious about it and do it. But don't work from home thinking you are spending quality time with your family when your attention is never fully on them.

Turn off the cell phone; shut down the Blackberry; put the computer to sleep. Focus your attention on your loved ones for at least a few minutes each day. They will thank you for it, and in the long run you will thank yourself.

The Productivity Trap

Personal productivity is a holy grail for many knowledge workers in the contemporary American economy. Just like pilgrims seeking the original Holy Grail, today's knowledge workers pursue an almost single-minded quest for the next new productivity tip or trick. (Examples: using a desk setup with two monitors to work more efficiently; becoming a disciple of David Allen's generally helpful Getting Things Done; multitasking anywhere and everywhere).

All this fascination with efficiency leads quickly to the Productivity Trap: the idea that contentment, or success, or happiness is achieved by getting more done. We become convinced that we are one tool away--a new tabbed notebook, perhaps, or one iPhone app--from working efficiently enough to allow us more evenings off, or to avoid Saturday work, or to earn the higher bonus we crave. "Once I'm efficient enough to handle this workload," we say to ourselves, "I'll be able to get my time back."

Sounds good, but no. Once you get efficient enough to handle it, your boss will be so impressed that she will put you on the even bigger project with even tighter time demands. "Congratulations!" she'll say. "You did so well on the small project that you get to lead the big one!" Or, you'll get to be the boss, and not only have to do your own work but make sure everyone else is doing theirs too. Your time commitment will increase, not decrease, and you'll be off again in search of a few tips to "save time". You are stuck in the Productivity Trap.

The Productivity Trap becomes a self-perpetuating cycle when we spend more time working on our productivity systems--organizing browser bookmarks, shifting folder tags, re-writing to-do lists, optimizing Outlook, etc.--than we do actually working. In trying to be more productive, we get less real work done. We end up with the strange ability to precisely track, file, and retrieve the list of things we didn't get done today.

This is not to say that all productivity is bad or that efficiency is a false goal. To the extent that a work-saving tip allows you to complete a necessary task in less time, then productivity is a blessing; you are being both efficient and effective. Disorganization often results in duplicative or unnecessary work; any form of organization that prevents this is a net gain and should be praised. However, we get stuck in the Productivity Trap when productivity becomes an end in itself, not a tool to be used to achive our real objectives.

The only way to free up extra time for yourself is to do less. Learn to be honest about what is really important. Be ruthless in saying "no" to unimportant obligations. Be disciplined in doing your important tasks first in the day, before interruptions divert your attention. Yes, be efficient (do things well), but only while being effective (doing the right things). Efficiency without effectiveness is waste.

Lazy, or just efficient?

Paul Johnson, the prolific historian who recently published a concise biography of Winston Churchill, once met the great statesman, when Churchill was old and Johnson was young. "Mr. Churchill, to what do you attribute your success?" asked Johnson. Churchill responded, "Economy of effort. Never stand when you can sit, and never sit when you can lie down." I thought of this story over the weekend when in the course of a conversation with my wife I made the observation that I am lazy.

"You're not lazy!" she exclaimed, reminding me that I manage to hold onto a decent job, I help out around the house to a (generally) satisfactory degree, and I even occupy many of my leisure hours with meaningful activity. She was of course thinking of the dictionary definition of lazy: "disinclined to activity or exertion," and I suppose by that standard she is right. I am certainly no workaholic, but I am not afraid of a little exertion.

But modify the definition with a qualifier--"disinclined to unnecessary activity or exertion," and by that revised definition I am proud to consider myself lazy. Indeed, it is my hypothesis that this kind of laziness is going to come to be seen as a virtue in the 21st century, as computing power continues to increase and the information stream turns into a river that threatens to drown us all who are trying to keep up.

Laziness is not yet mainstream; busyness is still the norm, and many people aspire to appear even busier than they are; this is because of the American tendency to equate busyness with importance. Indeed, my laziness probably limits my career prospects: I work for a big company, and the politics of big companies require one to excel at certain superfluous activities: face time in meetings that decide nothing, preparing reports and analyses of data that don't directly contribute to decisions (but do contribute to a perception that one must be busy), PowerPoint presentations to other groups in the company to explain graphically how busy one has been. (It is the grown-up version of your high school History teacher who demanded a 20-page paper on the Boston Tea Party. What if I can tell the story well in 15 pages? or 12? or 10?) Parkinson's Law is alive and well: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion."

The lazy person fights a lonely fight against this pattern of measuring inputs, and instead shifts the focus to outputs. The question for a lazy person is not "How much work am I doing (regardless of outcome)?" but "What is the minimum amount of input I need to provide to achieve the desired outcome?" Laziness does not mean always do the minimum acceptable; it means do as little as possible to achieve the desired result, which might still be a very high standard. Churchill attributed his success to economy of effort, and yet he still accomplished more than most of us would even dream of, and to a very high standard.

But in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century, laziness will deliver distinct advantages. Lazy people learn to discern the important from the merely urgent; this skill is invaluable when sorting through an email inbox that seems to refill more regularly than the miraculous jars of water that Jesus turned into wine. A lazy person is not afraid to say no to activities that don't support the goal; again, useful in work environments filled with cross-functional teams with no clear boss and no clear mandate. Finally, lazy people are efficient; they are constantly looking for a better way to do routine tasks, to free up time for more meaningful pursuits. In organizations that are trying to do more with less, this expertise can set one apart. Remember the old adage: "Want to know the best way to do something? Ask a lazy person."

Laziness involves certain challenges, however. First, one must be very thoughtful and clear about objectives. I believe much of our day-to-day busyness is merely activity that we use to avoid being honest with ourselves about what we need to or want to do. Second, if you work at a conventional company, you may have to accept a certain diminished career outlook, at least until your company recognizes the virtues of laziness for its bottom line. Unfortunately, many companies still like face time and frenetic activity, rather than actual results, as a signal of importance. And finally, you have to have a plan--what are you going to do with the time you free up by being more efficient? Are you interesting enough to have a life outside of work? Less work on any one project should mean you can work on more projects. If instead less equals less, then you have reverted to the traditional definition of laziness, and that is not a good place to be.

So join me in shedding the fear of being called lazy. Embrace economy of effort! Take back your time! Don't let the pervasive culture of busyness lead you to the trap of measuring your inputs instead of your outputs. Remember that what you do is more important than how you do it. Take Thomas Jefferson's advice to writers that the greatest skill is that of "never using two words when one will do" and apply it to all areas of your life.

Be lazy!

Would you take a year off?

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote about a bewildering choice made by several elite Yale Law School graduates last year to pass on an offer to take $80,000, plus benefits, plus student loan payments, to defer for a year starting as Associates at the elite Cravath law firm in New York.

Ashby Jones, who writes the Journal's Law Blog, points out some reasons why a student might choose to go ahead and work: the offer was optional, and the full-time pay is double the deferral offer; the students have been trained to do something and they want to get on with doing it; and, the types of people who thrive at top-tier law schools value structure in their lives, so a year with no structure or externally-imposed goals would be unthinkable.

But still. To me, the opportunity to get paid for a year off, before starting a job that is sure to consume nearly every waking hour for the first several years, seems a no brainer. Even now, mid-career, the idea of a sabbatical to pursue other interests for a year or so would be a welcome opportunity. I could write more, I could travel with the kids, I could be much more active for a year in church and charity work. I wonder if I would ever want to return to an office.

What about you? Would you take the money? What would you do for a year if you didn't have to work to support yourself?

Who Are You?

"What do you do?"

This is nearly always among the first questions we are asked (or that we ask) when we meet a new acquaintance. Appearance may form our initial impression of a person, but we want to know what they do in order to assign them a lasting place in our mental hierarchy. The answer conveys important social information about the person.

It signals their probable wealth, social status, perhaps the neighborhood they are likely to live in, and we may even project what we expect their house and car to look like. If I tell you, "I'm a doctor," your mind immediately places me in a certain size house, maybe with a sports car, probably with certain other status markers. If I tell you, "I'm a delivery driver," your mind immediately draws different conclusions.

We form these little judgments and opinions not only about the people we meet, but about ourselves as well. Anyone who works for a big company, unless you are a C-level executive, probably wrestles with self-image problems about his job. This is because big companies have splintered work into such tiny pieces that it is very difficult to describe what any one job is. Thus "Chief Financial Officer" is easy to understand, but "Financial Analyst in the Resource Evaluation and Recovery Group" conveys very little information to people you meet outside your company, and leaves them fuzzy about what exactly it is that you do. They therefore have trouble fitting you into their mental hierarchy. Is that better or worse than the friend they have who is an "Assistant brand manager for card processing products"? And if others are confused about our identity, then we get confused about our identity. This explains the people you meet who answer the question with a more general, "I'm in marketing," or "I'm in banking", which at least allows you to form a more clear picture of where they rank.

The trouble with all of this is that it means we form opinions of our acquaintances on gross generalizations and summary stereotypes about only a portion of someone's life. We may summarily dismiss very worthwhile people because "he works for the government" (stereotype: he's lazy) or "she's an accountant" (she's boring). When we turn these generalizations onto ourselves, we fall into the trap of defining our entire persona based on our work. While it is true that most of us must spend more time at work than doing anything else, it should not naturally follow that therefore work is the most important thing in our lives.

I work in an industry, finance, which has undergone constant change and upheaval over the past ten years. I have seen many co-workers laid off in restructurings and reorganizations, and even was displaced once myself. In my experience, the ones who are most resilient through the process are those whose self-identity consists of much more than what they do. When they ask themselves the question, "What do you do?", the answer is "I'm a painter," or "I'm a mother," or "I'm a biker" first, after which comes a job to make money.

Who are you? Yes, your career is important, but it will come to an end some day, perhaps at a time of your choosing, or perhaps at a time you don't choose. If you let your career define you, then that day will be the end of you; not your physical death, of course, but you will be adrift in the world, unsure of who you are, like a teenager trying to figure out where to fit in. Don't let that happen to you; be an interesting person, defined by a host of activities, relationships, and interests--in addition to a career.

Try this the next time you meet someone: don't ask them what they do. Instead, ask "What did you do last weekend?" or "Where are you going for vacation this year?" If they ask you what you do, answer first with a hobby: "I play guitar, and to make money I'm a banker." The conversation that follows should be much more interesting than "So how's work?", and it will teach you to value other people, and yourself, for who they are, not where they work.

BOOK REVIEW: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton

American culture has come to equate busyness with importance. If you are busy, you must be important. And, conversely, if you are not busy, then you must not be important. Since we seem to accept without question the premise that to be important is good, we therefore create a lot of busyness, and work. As a result, our identities become wrapped up in our work. Think about the last time you met someone new at a party; I'll wager the first question asked was, "So what do you do?"

Indeed, we often act as if what we do is very important to the proper functioning of the world. Memos are crafted on weekends; emails are returned late at night; phones are dialed as soon as the plane's wheels have touched the tarmac, so that we don't waste a precious minute as we do our part to advance the part of Western civilization that is dependent upon the widgets that our company produces. We behave like the sharks in the ocean, that must never stop swimming lest they die, as we rush from one "important" task to another.

Alain de Botton does a marvelous job of slowly letting the air out of our egos about our work in his thought-provoking book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. The book is based on the premise that nearly all of man's activity amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of the universe. Even 10 years from now, no one will know or care whether you get the Fitzsimmons memo to your boss by this Thursday's deadline. Or as de Botton observes:

If we could witness the eventual fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to immediate paralysis.

In this view, the self-importance that imbues so much of our daily work, that leads us to choke down sandwiches at our desk while we read reports, to travel half way across the country for a one hour sales meeting with someone we don't really like, and to waste countless hours in meetings talking about decisions that need to be made rather than actually making them, is actually a sophisticated form of self-deception, of coping with the fact that we are just tiny meaningless specks in the cosmos.

I know that sounds depressing, but don't let it put you off of this book, because de Botton comes to that conclusion after what I think must have been very enjoyable field work, visiting the practitioners of ten different jobs in a wide variety of industries. Among other pursuits, he spots cargo ships with avid hobbyists; walks the path of high-voltage electricity lines with an engineer; sits with a landscape painter; attends an aerospace trade show; and traces the 52-hour voyage of a tuna steak from a swimming fish in the Indian Ocean to a dinner plate in Bristol, England, in a photo essay that alone is worth the price of the book.

Along the way, de Botton finds much to admire in the work we do. A career counselor is humanely portrayed, a sort of minister in the secular religion of career. Accountancy is shown to be an important part of the modern capitalist system, if a bit of a boring job (about what I would expect). Logistics, especially, seems to fascinate de Botton, and he very compellingly shows it to be the under-appreciated backbone of modern consumerist life. Take that tuna steak, and think about it the next time you are at the market: only fifty-two hours after it was swimming in the Indian Ocean, the tuna had been caught, taken to land, filleted, packed, flown half way around the world, and trucked to a suburban grocery store. I won't soon complain about the price of fresh fish again!

There are many such products that we take for granted--that we expect to be available whenever we want them--without ever sparing a thought for the magic of the markets that have developed to bring them to us. As de Botton observes:

Two centuries ago, our forebears would have know the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools of their production. They were acquainted with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid.....We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude, and guilt.

Logistics is the enabler of this change, and a result of the change is the increasing specialization of our jobs. De Botton visits the offices of United Biscuits, a company of five thousand souls engaged in the manufacture of cookies and other sweets. We have all baked cookies in our own kitchens, and so understand that there is some meaning inherent in the work of a company baking them. But when that task is subdivided and spread across five thousand people and six manufacturing sites, does it still have the same meaning? Specialization has its benefits, especially in increasing productivity, but at what cost to our personal sense of meaning and accomplishment? Again, de Botton:

It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks, or farmers--people whose labors can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life.....we cannot help but sense that something is awry in a job title like "Brand Supervision Coordinator, Sweet Biscuits".....

But just when it may seem that de Botton's melancholy observations will outweigh his admiration for the work that people do, he makes what I find to be actually an optimistic conclusion: we puff up the importance of our work precisely because we do understand, at some level, that we are insignificant in the universe, that death is our only certainty, and that through our work we can take our minds off that ultimate melancholy thought. In other words, working is life because it takes our mind off of death. De Botton:

The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself coursing through us.....To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked '11:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.: coffee break'.....maybe all of this, in the end is working wisdom.

So yes, you are important. Yes, that memo has significance. Yes, your sales calls matter. Do your best at whatever it is you do, for in the end we are all dead. Therefore, live while you are alive!