The Career Advice I Wish I Knew

Next week, Scott Young and I are opening registration for a new session of our long-running online course, Top Performer, which helps you transform your professional life into something more autonomous and meaningful. This course draws from my 2012 contrarian career guide, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, meaning that we’ve been running it for close to a decade now, serving over 6,000 students (which I still can’t believe).

Which is all to say, when preparing for next week’s launch, I got a little nostalgic. Much of my recent work focuses on the subtle impacts of technology on various aspects of modern culture. This course, by contrast, harkens from an era of my writing life when I was still grappling with more earnest questions, like figuring out how to do well in your job.

Fueled by this nostalgia, I thought it might make for an interesting essay to try to bridge my current efforts with this past chapter. In particular, I want to tackle the following thought-provoking question that a student asked me during one of the events I held up at Dartmouth College this past summer:

“What’s one thing you’ve explored in your recent writing that you wish you had included in _So Good They Can’t Ignore You?_ “

There are many different answers I could offer here, but one that’s stuck with me in the weeks since that summer event is the following: **when trying to do better in your job, care more about workload than work speed.**

Most productivity advice and tools focus on efficiency: More powerful software lets you produce better results in fewer clicks. Ubiquitous high-speed internet means you can be reached anywhere, and predictive typing means you can respond faster than ever before. Google gets you any information within moments and artificial intelligence will perhaps one day soon figure out what you need before you even realize it.

There’s nothing wrong with speed. All things being equal, it can’t _hurt_ to finish a task faster, so long as you don’t get obsessed about such ends. But it’s not lack of speed that’s holding us back from producing more impactful results. The real enemy in modern knowledge work is the overwhelming quantity of obligations, tasks, and projects that we’re managing at any one time.

Each thing we agree to do brings with it a hidden “tax” of overhead needed to maintain it, such as email interactions, check-in meetings and administrative actions. In isolation, these activities are easy and far from onerous (how hard is it to answer a simple email query?). The problems emerge when they begin to pile up. Once you’ve agreed to dozens of different commitments, the resulting aggregated overhead tax can grow to dominate your schedule, creating a calendar fragmented by meetings and calls, with the gaps between riddled with frantic efforts to keep up with the corresponding email and Slack conversations.

In this distracted state, it’s difficult to produce quality and important work at any reasonable rate. The problem, in other words, is not lack of _speed_ but instead lack of (schedule) _space_. What we need to produce at the highest level is not more powerful tools, but instead freedom from an overcrowded plate.

These observations tell a story about work, but it’s also a story about technology. It was, in many ways, innovations such as email, the internet, and mobile computing that allowed our workloads to balloon to their current obscene magnitudes. Given this reality, we cannot depend on even newer and faster technologies to save us. The solution to overload will not be found in a slick new web-based application or shiny digital device. It will instead be a cultural — a fundamental change in how we, and more importantly, the organizations where we work, think about the most humane and reasonable ways to manage, track, and assign all it is that we need to do.

In the meantime, as paradoxical as this might sound, if you’re looking to make an impact in your job, you should be looking to say “no” much more often.

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_For more on_Top Performer _, which will be open for new registrations from_ _**September 18-22**_ _, check out the course website_here _._

_For a more detailed discussion of the distinction between workload and work speed, see this_recently-posted segment _from my podcast_ , Deep Questions.​

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