Workaholism
By: Michael Beiter
I met a client this morning who has successfully lost thirty-five pounds of fat and has kept it off for six months.
When asked what is challenging her, she responded the same way many others do: "work."
Two days ago, a conversation about how this person couldn't do anything but work brought me to tears. I quickly walked down the hall to my library, found one of my favorite books on work, and read aloud.
Jason Fried and David Hansson, authors of ReWork, have this to say:
Workaholism
"Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all-nighters and sleep at the office. It's considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work.
Not only is workaholism unnecessary, but it's also stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.
First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. When the burnout crash comes - and it will - it'll hit that much harder.
Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. Then they try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.
They even create crises. They don't look for ways to be more efficient because they like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) so that they can get off on working more.
Workaholics make the people who don't stay late feel inadequate for "merely" working reasonable hours. That leads to guilt and poor morale all around. Plus, it leads to an ass-in-seat mentality - people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren't being productive.
If all you do is work, you're unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision-making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra effort and what's not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired.
In the end, workaholics don't accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that means they're wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task.
Workaholics aren't heroes. They don't save the day; they use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done."
I read that aloud to my client. She responded: "Yep, that is dead on."
We filled out a time management worksheet and planned to set some boundaries at work so that she could get more time to focus on her eating and exercise.
For her saying yes to her health meant saying no to the workaholism she has practiced for years.
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