When In Doubt, Work Less

This week marked the end of my PhD application cycle.

In retrospect, it was a shitload of work. I ran around campus, met with potential supervisors, gathered letters of recommendation, and drafted a project proposal for two months straight while also writing/ranting into a microphone weekly for your entertainment.

This kind of workload would typically crush me, prompting another freak-out stay at a cabin in the woods surrounded by orchids and homemade jam (did this last summer). But this time, I feel strangely ok. Though I had a lot going on, I still made time to work out, read good books, and spend time with people I love.

Something changed this time for real, and I’d like to share that change with you this week. I think over the past two months I shifted from overworking to underworking and it made all the difference.

For context, I’ve been a workaholic for as long as I can remember. I like the feeling of seeing a full to-do list checked off. I adore the subtle high from an intensive stretch of work and above all, I love being obsessive.

But here’s the problem with obsession: it bloats work up to be a bigger deal than it needs to be. Sometimes to the point where it becomes its own high while we disregard the work itself.  

Bertrand Russell wrote in The Conquest of Happiness:

“One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.”

My therapist told me a different version of this exact quote a few months ago. “If you need to obsess over anything,” she said, “obsess over not obsessing about work. Slow way down.”

So, I ran my little underworking experiment. My rule was that I would work 30% less every day but ensure the little amount of work I did was executed well.

At first, it felt strange. Writing 300 words a day is guilt-inducing and reading 5 pages a day felt like a joke. Also, with underworking I was able to get everything done by 3 pm, freeing up an ungodly amount of free time normally devoted to obsessive and mindless work.

A month later, someone noticed a change. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” my girlfriend said, “but have you recently had surgery?”

“Huh?” I didn’t catch her drift.

“Has the stick up your ass been removed?” She said.

Later that month I reviewed my to-do list. I missed an item or two but I still finished all the necessary writing and my 5-paged morning readings got me halfway through Homer’s The Iliad (it’s a literal brick). It turned out that consistency matters more than obsessing over something daily.

It’s a strange feeling and here’s the way I see it: underworking forces us to shift away from a quantity-based metric to a quality-based judgement. All of a sudden, work is not about justifying our worth nor about outpacing everyone. It’s about letting go of the energy wasted on being obsessive and rechannelling them into enjoying the work, perfecting our techniques and most importantly, the quality free time where we’re free to grow alongside people in our lives.

Until next week

Robin