Total work or work problem?
Total work
A few years back I was consumed by work.
But not in the sense of overworking and burning out. In fact, back then I'm sure I worked substantially less than I do now. Indeed, reading some of my notes from back then, I'd have to say I'd be shocked to hear about the pace I manage to keep these days.
But, nevertheless, I was consumed by work.
I remember reading, at the time, Michael Ashcroft's post on "total work." Michael quotes Maria Popova in summarizing it:
Under the tyranny of total work, the human being is reduced to a functionary and her work becomes the be-all-end-all of existence.
At the time, I was struck by the relatability of this idea. I was consumed with work, because work had become my "be-all-end-all."
But at the heart of this predicament was a paradox: how could work be all-consuming, when I was simultaneously seeming to do so little?
The answer is simple: when I wasn't working (most of the time) I was feeling guilty about not working. To distract from the guilt, I mostly would end up passively consuming media (reading blogs, watching youtube) and asking myself why I could never manage to do anything more constructive.
At the heart of it was a feeling of compulsion – I needed to do more, but wasn't. This compulsion was an endless source of suffering in my life, and yet it achieved nothing. No matter how much I felt that I "should" be working on X, Y, or Z, nothing more actually got done on X, Y, or Z. Which then led to a greater feeling of compulsion, with just as little actual work as a result.
Michael's suggestion, in response to seeing this tendency in himself, was to focus on taking a "non-doing" approach. There was nothing inherently to be done about the problem, because actively doing anything in response to this "total work" problem then itself became additional work to be completed.
How can we actually deviate from Total Work? By not trying to. Just notice that it's there and don’t try to change anything.
Total work, or work problem?
Virginia Valian has written two essays on what she calls "work problems" back in the late '70s and early '80s. You can find them here and here.
In the first, she addresses a work problem that she faced during her graduate studies – an inability to sit down and work on her thesis. To solve this problem she designed what she refers to in the second essay as "Program One". In short, this is a simple system of daily work, for just 15 minutes a day to start, because 15 minutes felt manageable.
In the second essay, she describes Program Two, which is a new solution for a new context. In particular, she was "immobilized" after being passed over for tenure and getting a series of paper rejections. Program Two is more advanced – reflecting her more mature and experienced level at this time. It contains several parts, but it revolves around delineating exactly what kind of "work" she felt was fulfilling, and making space for it in her daily schedule (2 hrs). She relies on an ally for co-working at first, and continues with weekly checkins after they are no longer physically working in the same location. They discuss each other's work, and time use, and work through emotional challenges together, all as a way of maintaining and reinforcing the alignment between their behaviour, and the work that they know is ultimately self-fulfilling.
At this point I must explain that Valian is using the word “work” with a particular meaning here. For Valian, work must be, for those who have it, fulfilling of the “true self”. That is to say, one “has work” if one has a self-concept that is tied up in doing that type of work. A work problem, as she sees it, is a misalignment between this self-concept and one’s actual behaviour.
For people doing intellectual work, I think this is a reasonable approach, since most such people presumably choose to take up that work due to some sense that it is fulfilling and important to their identity. And note that Valian recognizes that this type of work by no means makes up the entirety of one’s job; her notion of a work problem does not apply to aspects of the job outside of what is really one’s work.
Bearing those clarifications in mind, the first thing to notice is just how much Valian's framing of her work problem, especially while working on her dissertation, mirrors my experience described above. She describes a vacillation between studying, getting fellowships, and running experiments on one side, and bouts of procrastination on the other – days spent doing "nothing but reading novels." This kept her in a position of doing "just enough to get by." By the time she had completed her research work, she knew she would never finish the writing of her thesis if she didn't change her relationship with work. She perfectly explains the paradox I describe above, of being consumed by work, while simultaneously not doing any work at all (emphasis at the end added by me):
I didn't know how I spent my days, except that I never seemed to have enough time or energy to do things I wanted to do. By the end of a day, I would have accomplished nothing, have no idea where the time had gone, and then be very depressed. I felt so guilty about not working that I couldn't do anything else either, because I should have been spending that time working. But since I couldn't work when I "should," I often spent the allotted time doing nothing, literally nothing. One of the most self-destructive aspects of not working is that very little other activity or development takes place.
But in contrast to the total work framing, Valian does not conclude from this that work is a totalizing force preventing her from living the rest of her life. Instead, her argument is that work is one of the many parts of her life, and her work problem is preventing her from satisfying that part of herself. The resulting guilt and frustration makes her unable to do the other things that are important to her, because it always feels as though she really should be doing the work. And, indeed, she describes how after she got a handle on this problem, she saw her time open up:
Once I began trying to fit work into the rest of my life, that is, once I began not just working but doing other things as well, I found that I had been denying myself many satisfactions. I had a number of interests and talents that had been lying fallow. I began to take up the piano again, to learn French, to learn about wines and wild mushrooms, to read more nonfiction for pleasure.
And this freedom to enjoy the rest of her life came from ensuring that she consistently made the space for her work in her life, even in a small way. The paradoxical feeling of being consumed by work, while hardly doing any work at all, was, at its heart, a work problem.
Emotional blockages create work problems
I find this framework particularly appealing for two reasons. The first is that it is unapologetically pro-work, recognizing that the feeling of being called to a particular vocation or intellectual path is a beautiful thing, and a privilege for those fortunate enough to have it.
The second is that it is remarkably validating of one’s self-understanding, and encourages true self-posession.
To better understand what I mean by this, let us again consider the problem. At its heart, a work problem can be boiled down to a misalignment between one’s self-concept around work, and one’s actual behaviour. There are at least two ways to understand this misalignment. The first, and from what I’ve seen, most common conclusion can be understood in analogy with what economists call “revealed preferences.” In particular, it is commonly argued that one’s behaviour reveals what one’s actual preferences are, and therefore in the case of a work problem, the behaviour reveals that the self-conception is false. The fact that one is failing to do the work that one believes is self-fulfilling indicates that one does not truly want to do that work.
In contrast to this “revealed preferences” framing, while Valian acknowledges that people with work problems, herself included, do indeed suffer from this misalignment, she takes the opposite conclusion. She states: “people are not wrong about their true selves;” thus, it is not the self-concept, but the behaviour that is the problem. And the behaviour problem, for Valian, is one that may be driven by psychological blockages, and therefore may be solvable through introspection, therapy, and gradual behavioural interventions that rebuild and strengthen the self-concept.
For her own case, she identifies a number of coincident emotional blockages that all contribute to her work problem. For one, she describes a constant line of questioning when working on her thesis around whether she was good enough to do whatever she was trying to do.
My preoccupation with my ability seemed to imply a need to be perfect, which is both a sign of arrogance and of weakness. It says, in effect, "I am so smart I can demand perfection of myself, something impossible for lesser mortals." But it also says, "I have so little confidence in my personal worth that professional imperfection is symbolic of personal unworthiness."
In other words, her paralyzing sense of perfectionism is a product of her ego protecting itself. Whether conscious or not, this sort of blockage, by preventing the work from ever getting done, allows one to sustain fantastic ideas about the impact of one's work. She explains how such fantasies were themselves highly demotivating due to the contrast with the reality of what she was working on:
I could too easily find myself inhabiting a fantasy world in which my thesis led to fame and renown. Not only was this eventuality extremely unlikely, but it led me further away from, rather than closer to, my goal of discovering the pleasures of the process of work. I wanted to work not because of the supposed effect of my work on others, but for the gratifications, to me, of working. My fantasies made the reality of my barely begun thesis look so shabby I didn't want to have anything to do with it. At the beginning, then, I refused to dwell on actually finishing my work and concentrated instead on doing it.
Valian also describes a related blockage around self-handicapping – one that will be familiar to many students (myself included). By engineering situations wherein to some degree "the deck was stacked against [her]," her eventual successful performance, even if only adequate rather than excellent, was evidence of her remarkable ability. She identifies this as the reason for procrastination: when the deadline is just close enough, with great effort she can succeed in making it, overcoming the odds, and conveniently preventing her from having time to actually do her honest best.
Finally, she points out that her instinct at the slightest problem in her work would reliably be to quit, rather than persist. She was not confident that she could simply work through problems – instead, they were evidence of her insufficiency.
While these problems will not be universal to anyone experiencing a work problem, it nonetheless demonstrates that the misalignment between the self-concept and the behaviour need not necessarily prove that the self-concept is false. Instead, emotional blockages such as those described by Valian provide a plausible explanation for why the behaviour might be misaligned, and point the way toward the possibility of realignment while preserving the self-concept.
Engineering the self: toward agency in the realm of self-conception
In the first essay Valian's ultimate solution to her work problem was to begin a daily habit of working for at least one 15 minute burst each day. And while it sounds incredibly simple, it actually addresses many of the emotional blockages that she describes.
Consider the last point that I described – the tendency to quit at the slightest problem in the work. By committing to fifteen minutes, even if a problem arises in the middle of the work session, the short duration provides comfort: surely she can manage another few minutes to complete the 15 minutes of work. She notes that by being forced to face one's problems in this way, one gradually gains the experience working through those problems. And the more that one does that, the more one comes to know they can work through those problems. And so this experience helps her to understand that problems while working are not evidence of her insufficiency – they are merely problems to be solved. Problems which she can solve.
And similarly, by working those fifteen minutes each day, she gradually builds up more and more experience with the reality of her work. Steady daily progress means that she is no longer able to procrastinate and self-handicap. And she can no longer hold out for perfection. At least for that 15 minutes, her work is exactly what it is, in all its imperfect glory.
The key point I want to emphasize about this gentle realignment of her behaviour with her work self-concept is its intentionality. For me, it is a beautiful pointer toward agency in the realm of self-conception – a kind of self-engineering.
On that note, in the second essay Valian describes the use of a work log which allows her to record and track her actual progress day to day. She finds this helpful to learn about what aspects of the work come more easily or with greater difficulty. But most importantly she points out that the log gives a clear record of her progress – a reminder of not only her effort, but the real fruits of that effort. As Victor Frankl points out in Man's Search For Meaning, the past is an immutable store of potentialities actualized, and this history can never be taken away.
In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity. From this one may see that there is no reason to pity the old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that: Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past -the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized -and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.
The log serves as a physical representation of this history. In creating it, Valian is intentionally gathering real evidence of her behaviour that aligns with the self-concept, and in doing so is making the self-concept stronger and more resilient.
Program two in the second essay contains additional strategies to build and protect the work self-concept. For example, she finds an ally, and by coworking creates accountability which ensures they both keep working, and therefore continue behaving in accordance with the self-concept. The same ally also helps see the situation more objectively when her emotional reactions start to call her self-concept into question. She again gives the example of an emotional response telling her that a simple mistake is indicative of her being unfitted to the work, while her ally could point out that it's only a mistake and of course means no such thing.
She also describes using the work log to work through difficult emotions that would otherwise impede her continued efforts. By recognizing the parts of her that felt these difficult emotions, it allowed her to also recognize and hold space for the part that did want to do it:
Writing about my problems helped to contain them, perhaps by giving them an overt form. I simultaneously acknowledged that part of me indeed felt certain ways – there it was, down on paper, that I utterly hated the article I was writing – and that another part of me wanted to and would write the article. I paid tribute to the part that was in agony without letting it dominate the part that wanted to work.
Other aspects of the program can be seen as practical interventions to ensure she continues to make space in her life to cultivate the self-concept. For example, she realizes that her days are easily filled with other aspects of her job that don't necessarily further her work. By merely slotting her work in between all these other job-related commitments, she realizes that she is treating her work as unimportant. To correct this, she designs a weekly schedule where she ensures that each day contains at least a two-hour block for her to continue to do her work. This block is not to be moved for other job-related responsibilities. In so doing, she ensures her days have the space for the work that continues to build and strengthen her identity as someone who actually does that sort of work.
The schedule also clarifies the extent of her other commitments, and the amount of time that is actually available for work. This allows her to "make friends with reality;" that is, by knowing the limitations of the available time, she can set realistic expectations that can actually be met. Without this clarity, it can be too easy to set unrealistic expectations that lead to disappointment, and ultimately weaken one's belief in the self-concept, which creates a downward spiraling away from the desired behaviour.
There are other practical gems of wisdom throughout both essays, and if this post has resonated with any reader, I strongly recommend reading them both. But I think that this really gets to the core of why these essays seem to so much better address my own problem than the total work discourse that I started by referencing.
Valian's notion of a work problem, defined as a failure to do the work which for one is self-fulfilling, directly leads to the paradoxical total work phenomenology: an obsession with work that crowds out enjoyment of other things and makes work (or more accurately, the failure to work) the defining aspect of one's life. But Valian shows that one need not simply accept this failure to work as evidence against the self-concept that produced the belief in the need to do the work in the first place. On the contrary, one’s self-concepts can be trusted. Instead, the problem is with the misaligned behaviour, which may well be attributable to emotional blockages preventing one from enjoying the work. Those emotional blockages are key, because they are concrete problems which can be gradually worked through and overcome. One can actively implement strategies to address these blockages and gently align behaviour with the self-concept. If this process is successful, then as one builds up more and more history of behaviour in alignment with the work self-concept, one is literally transformed into exactly the kind of person that does that kind of work.
Where the total work framing makes this problem feel almost impossible to address, the work problem framing is practical and actionable. It is a reminder that one has agency, even in the realm of one's own self-understanding, and one's relation to the world. And while there is no single, simple solution to every work problem, Valian provides a framework to understand and address work problems in a personalized way.
When I realized the limits of Program II, I was at first depressed and discouraged. But I have since relinquished my desire for a lifetime solution, seeing the desire as both unrealistic and unnecessary. The desire is unrealistic because programs must be specific if they are going to work, and their very specificity limits them. The desire is unnecessary because I have me. Programs I and II did not drop from the sky. I developed them. The person who developed I and II can develop III.
I have come, then, to two inductive conclusions. First, I will probably always have a work problem, and it will require different solutions at different points in my life. Second, I will be able to construct those solutions as I need them.