Some people want you to believe that quitting is weak and for losers. They’re lying and we need to normalize leaving jobs that are not good for us.
In this video we take a deep look at what happens when you’re unhappy at work, how you can know it’s time to quit and how you can support others who need to get away from a bad job.
Content:
(00:00) 1: Frogs aren’t idiots (01:01) 2: Introduction to quitting
(03:45) 3: How hating your job hurts you
(06:56) 4: Exposing the anti-quitting propaganda
(18:05) 5: The excuses people make for not quitting
(27:23) 6: Should you quit?
(32:47) 7: 21 perfectly valid reasons for quitting
(40:21) 8: What if you can’t quit
(46:24) 9: How to quit
(47:39) 10: Should you always find a new job first before you quit?
(49:42) 11: We should celebrate quitters
(59:22) 12: I quit!
I think that’s complete nonsense! I know – what a shocker :) But worst of all it’s poorly reasoned nonsense that relies on a string of terrible arguments and deliberate ignorance of the research in the field.
Here are the top 5 fails from DeBrarander’s article and why you should most definitely seek work you’re passionate about.
1: He blames the long US working hours on people’s passion for their jobs
The United States offers a curious paradox: Though the standard of living has risen, and creature comforts are more readily and easily available — and though technological innovations have made it easier to work efficiently — people work more, not less.
Why is this?
One theory is that Americans have come to expect work to be a source of meaning in their lives.
There are no studies showing that people who find work meaningful work more hours than those who don’t.
If you want to actually know why working hours are still on the rise in the US, I think it makes much more sense to look at some of these factors:
Bad management practices
Workplace cultural norms
Economic insecurity caused by a hugely challenged middle class that are one pay check away from financial disaster.
The high cost of college educations and the huge amount of debt that many young people graduate with – meaning that they absolutely must work or face personal bankruptcy.
Put people with huge financial insecurity in a workplace that expects and demands 60, 70 or 80-hour work weeks, and they most often have no option but to go along and work themselves to death.
2: Being passionate about your work means that you experience constant bliss
Most people are certainly guaranteed to fail in this pursuit [of passion at work]. Even people who love their jobs will report they must do thankless tasks from time to time. Few, if any, experience nonstop bliss, where sheer passion sustains them through long hours on the job.
Notice what DeBrabrander did there? He just redefined being passionate about your work to mean that you experience nonstop bliss and sheer sustained passion.
This is what’s known as a strawman argument, where you exaggerate, misrepresent, or just completely fabricate someone’s position, to make it easier to attack.
Just to be clear: Being passionate about your job does not mean that you experience nonstop bliss. Everyone has bad days at work – and that’s perfectly OK. And of course every job contains a mix of tasks that you enjoy and tasks that suck – and that’s OK too.
3: Young people burn out because they seek passion at work
There is plenty of evidence that our high-octane work culture has serious consequences. It is at least partly responsible for high levels of burnout among millennials.
And while there definitely is an increase of stress, burnout, depression and mental problems among young people, it’s intellectually lazy to just conclude that it’s caused mainly – or even partly – by their search for passion and meaning at work.
Young people are also facing many other pressures, including a global climate disaster that no one is doing much about, while they are of course the ones who will have to live with the consequences of that inaction. Might that be a source of stress for them? No, says DeBrabrande – their real problem is that they expect their jobs to be meaningful.
4: If you seek passion in your work, you will fail
A recent study of priorities among young people found that achieving one’s career passion ranks highest of all… Finding a fulfilling job is almost three times more important than having a family, teenagers in the study reported.
It is daunting to contemplate. Most people are certainly guaranteed to fail in this pursuit.
Got that? If you seek passion at work, you are almost guaranteed to fail. Really? How would he know? Of course, he’s previously redefined passion at work to mean constant bliss and if that’s your goal, of course you will fail.
And just to make it worse, the study he links to in support of his claim is not even about passion at work. The actual finding is that 95% of US teenagers surveyed say that “having a job or career they enjoy” is important to them.
5: Passion means that work is the ONLY source of meaning in your life
We might begin by rejecting the notion that work should consume our lives, define and give meaning to them…
Again, the article dishonestly redefines passion to mean that work consumes your life and gives meaning to it.
In reality, passion for your job simply means that you are passionate about the work you do – not that it’s the only thing are passionate about.
Why you absolutely should seek work you’re passionate about
This kind of attack on happiness at work is nothing new. Many serious people are coming out of the woodwork to declare that happiness at work is stupid, impossible, naïve, silly, manipulative and/or bad for you. In the video above we cover their 20 most used objections to workplace happiness and why they’re wrong.
DeBrabrander’s analysis is poorly argued and of course also wrong. Everyone should absolutely seek work they’re passionate about. There are many reasons why, but the most important are these:
It will make you happier at work
It will make you happier in life
It will make you more successful at work
It will protect you from doing harmful work – whereas not trying to find meaning at work makes it more likely that you will end up doing work that exploits or harms others
Work is where you will spend many of your waking hours – of course you should spend that time doing something you care about
Work is where you will invest most of your energy, skills and competencies – all of that effort should be invested in the service of a cause you care about
Paradoxically, I actually think DeBrabrander agrees! When he talks about approaching work as duty rather than passion, he bases this on an understanding of duty that comes from stoic philosophy. I have many, many issues with stoic philosophy – not least that it is based on the idea that we are all subjects to a predetermined fate – but it has recently become very fashionable, especially among silicon valley tech bros.
In the NYTimes pice, DrBrabrander recounts The advice of Seneca, one of the most prominent stoics to define duty like this:
Seneca’s advice to Serenus is to focus on doing his duty. He must perform the job he is best disposed and able to perform, as determined by his nature, and the needs of those around him. And he must forget about glory or thrill or personal fulfillment — at least in the near term. If he performs his duty, Seneca explains, fulfillment will come as a matter of course.
Duty, in this definition, is not just about having a “Shut up and do your job” approach. It’s about doing work that you’re good at and which meets the needs of those around you.
In the “calling” orientation, people are working not for career advancement or for financial gain, but instead for the fulfilment or the meaning that the work itself brings to the individual. People who see their work more as a calling see the work as an end in itself that is deeply fulfilling and regardless of the kind of work they’re doing, they tend to see the work as having a societal benefit.
It’s ultimately about working for something bigger than yourself.
The upshot
This opinion piece is poorly researched and dishonest – so of course the advice it gives is bad.
Seeking passion and meaning at work is the path to more career happiness and success and less stress and burnout. It’s also one way you can help create a better world, by making sure that all of your professional skill and energy is spent in the service of something that you can clearly see is making the world a better place, rather than in just obtaining a pay check or career advancement.
I have to say, if you make your career choices with no consideration for where your passions lie, I honestly pity you.
In dancing – just as in business – there are leaders and followers. But if you think this means that “The leader always leads and the follower does what they’re told” then you’re very wrong.
Miranda van Wonterghem is an international swing dance teacher and in this amazing talk from our International Conference On Happiness at Work, she revealed the three main things business leaders should learn from dancers to create happier and more effective leadership – AND demonstrated it with dancing.
Sure, it has its problems. Any time you measure anything, you run the risk of getting bad data, the wrong data or making bad decisions based on the data.
But it still makes sense for two main reasons.
First and most obviously, if you measure employee happiness right, it can actually guide efforts to improve the workplace by identifying organizational problems and strengths.
Also, most business leaders are highly results oriented and data driven and find it hard to value things they can’t put a number on. Tracking employee happiness with hard numbers in some way can bolster organizational commitment to happiness initiatives.
So what can you measure? This can go way beyond just an annual job satisfaction survey. It’s essential to find the metrics that are relevant to your employees, your customers and your organization.
Here are all the potential ways we’ve come up with to measure employee happiness. Did we forget any? Write a comment if you have one we didn’t include.
Measure employee mood
If you want to know how happy your employees are, you can quite simply ask them. The traditional way is of course to run annual satisfaction surveys but I’m very skeptical about that approach.
You can measure things like:
Happiness
Satisfaction
Engagement
Well-being
Psychological capital
You can conduct the measurement using surveys, apps, mood boards or even just tennis balls.
Other employee metrics
Two other obvious employee-related metrics are:
Absenteeism
Employee turnover
Each of these have a direct bottom line impact and are directly correlated with employee happiness.
Hiring
Happy organizations also attract more and better new hires. That means that you could also measure on metrics like:
Applications received per opening posted
Time to fill positions
Rate of acceptance of job offers
Rate of successful hires (how many new employees stay at least x months)
This will be especially relevant in fast-growing workplaces or in industries where there is strong competition for the best talent.
Customer metrics
We know that happy employees make the customers happy. Some potential metrics are:
Customer happiness / satisfaction
Customer loyalty / repeat business
Brand perception
Employee performance
We also know that happy employees do a better job, so measuring happiness could also mean tracking metrics like:
Productivity
Quality / errors
Workplace safety / accidents
Success rate of innovation / change projects
Negative behavior
Given that happy employees are less likely to engage in bad behavior at work, we could also track metrics like:
HR complaints
Fraud / stealing
Physiological measures
This area is a little more speculative but some people have suggested measuring things like:
Cortisol in saliva samples
Blood pressure
Sleep time and quality
These do raise some ethical issues around privacy and bodily autonomy.
The upshot
Measuring employee happiness can help efforts to improve a workplace and strengthen leadership’s focus and commitment to these efforts.
While traditional satisfaction surveys have a long list of problems, there are many other metrics you can look at.
No workplace should measure all of these metrics. Depending on the industry, situation and type of employees only a small subset of these will be relevant. It’s up to each workplace to define which are the most relevant and to find a good way to track and act on these metrics.
Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Chinese tech company Alibaba, has come out in favor of the so-called 996 rule, i.e. that you should work from 9am to 9pm 6 days a week if you want to have a successful career. For anyone doing the math that’s 72 hours of work a week. Add a 1 hour commute on top of that and there’s very little time left for your family, kids, hobbies, exercise and life in general.
His belief in this is unshakeable:
“I personally think that 996 is a huge blessing,” hesaid. “How do you achieve the success you want without paying extra effort and time?”
He also added that you can only achieve business success through suffering and sacrifice.
I realize I may be wasting my time here by going up against a belief that is so prevalent among business leaders, but there’s no way I can let that kind of nonsense pass and not point out exactly why it’s wrong. Here are 5 quick reasons:
1: Pointing to successful people that achieved success by working 72 hours a week proves nothing. What about all the people that worked just as hard but failed?
2: Many of the mental qualities that make a person successful at work are lost when people are overworked, tired, stressed and unhappy, including networking, creativity and effective decision making.
So permanent overwork does not lead to increased results and success – in fact it hurts people AND profits.
It’s easy to point to Alibaba and say “But they work really long hours and the company is successful. Check mate!” But that’s just correlation; where is the proof that they are profitable BECAUSE OF the long working hours? Maybe they would’ve been even more profitable if their employees were happy, relaxed and had lives outside of work too? The research certainly indicates that.
So why do so many people still believe this nonsense? As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman noted, it’s difficult to change people’s minds. Look at this picture:
Every horizontal line is perfectly straight. Don’t believe me? Hold up a ruler to your screen and check. OK, now that you know the horizontal lines are straight, what does your mind see? Bendy lines.
So here’s a simple tip you can try very easily: Open your next meeting with a round where each person shares something positive. You can pick one of these questions and let everyone share:
Name one thing you’ve accomplished since the last meeting that you’ve been proud of.
Name a person who has helped you since the last meeting.
Mention one thing you’re looking forward to at work in the coming week.
What’s the funniest thing someone has told you in the last week?
Mention something interesting you’ve learned in the last week.
Don’t spend a lot of time on this, just give each participant about 30 seconds to share something positive. If the group is bigger than 10-12 people, let people share in pairs and then let 3 or 4 people share with the whole group so it doesn’t take more than a few minutes.
It really works wonders for a meeting. One person told me this after trying it out:
Hi Alexander,
I have been reading your work for a few days now, and I cannot get enough.
We have 4 analysts on our team, who touch many if not all groups in our company. Our role often means our view is black and white in order to deliver results, which is often received in a bad light.
So, I tried starting a meeting with something positive. It was like the Jedi mind trick for convincing others to lobby for our interests!
My Sr Analyst was struggling to keep her jaw from dropping. No more than a simple ask of what is the funniest thing your kids have said to you lately. Everyone had a story, and we all laughed for a quick 2 minutes before getting to the agenda.
Just wanted to say, “Thank you,”
All the best,
-Grant
And it’s not only fun, it will also make your meeting more effective as this experiment shows:
Psychological experiments can be very devious, and this one was certainly no exception. The focus was meetings and the format was simple: Groups of people were asked to discuss and reach consensus on a contentious topic.
Here’s the devious bit: Unbeknownst to the other participants one member of the group was an actor hired by the researchers. The actor was told to speak first in the discussions. In half the experiments he would say something positive while in the other half he would start by saying something critical. After that he simply participated in the discussion like the other group members.
The experiment showed that when the first thing said in the meeting was positive, the discussion turned out more constructive, people listened more and were more likely to reach consensus. When the first statement was negative the mood became more hostile, people were more argumentative and consensus became less likely.
The researchers concluded that the way a meeting starts has a large impact on the tone of the discussion and on whether or not the group will eventually reach consensus.
I met a manager recently who claimed in no uncertain terms that companies should forget all about employee happiness and focus only on engagement. He argued that people can be happy at work without performing well, whereas employee engagement leads directly to better performance.
I’ve actually heard this claim a few times recently, but it is still wrong. In this article we’ll look at why.
But first let’s define the two terms. Both can be defined in many different ways, which will confuse any discussion, so here are the definitions I will base my argument on.
This is the first result that comes up when you google “employee engagement definition”:
Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel passionate about their jobs, are committed to the organization, and put discretionary effort into their work.
And this is the definition of happiness at work that we use:
Happiness at work is the extent to which employees feel good about their jobs.
Both are clearly emotional at their core (the word “feel” appears in both) but the key difference is that engagement is more about the work and less about the person. It’s not really about how you feel in general, it’s how passionate you feel about your job, how committed you are to the workplace and how much extra effort you put in.
Happiness at work, as we define it, is how work makes you feel more broadly. It’s not about feeling good every second of every work day, but it is about experiencing mostly positive feelings about your job.
Just to make it clear: We think employee engagement is a useful concept and we are not arguing against it. We just want to argue that of the two, it is much more effective for a company to focus on making their employees happy than on making them engaged. Here are the four main reasons why.
1: Happiness is easier to sell to employees
Whether you’re looking to create employee happiness or engagement, you need your employees to be active partners in the process. This is not something you can do to them without their active and willing participation or (even worse) against their will.
Employee engagement, being directly related to commitment and effort, is a very easy sell to managers and companies. Every manager wants employees who are passionate about their work and go above and beyond to do a better job.
But seen from the employee side, it’s a much harder sell. When a manager states that they want their employees to “be more engaged in their work” or “give more discretionary effort” it can easily come off as if they are simply demanding more passion and work from people, without giving anything back.
On the other hand, when a manager sets a goal to create a happy workplace, the benefits are immediately clear to employees and it’s much easier to engage them in the process.
Ironically, happiness can be a harder sell towards managers, many of whom are skeptical of “all that happiness crap”. This video covers their most common objections and why they’re wrong:
2: Engagement without happiness is unsustainable
How engaged can someone really be if they’re unhappy at work?
Having worked in a number of charities, non-profit orgs and social enterprises, I can tell you that most of these employees are passionate and committed about their org’s cause but unfortunately a lot of the orgs don’t have a very happy work environment and it’s not uncommon at all to find super engaged yet super unhappy employees working in these orgs.
This is something I talk a lot about in my discussions with potential clients. I myself have been in this circumstance a number of times, being super engaged but miserable. And while I performed satisfactorily, had I been happy I would have blown the job out of the water.
A person can be incredibly passionate about their work and totally committed to the workplace, but still be miserable at work. I’ve seen this happen for instance when people are treated badly by their coworkers or manager or when they can’t do their job in a way that satisfies their own professional standards.
In this case, two things can happen:
The employee’s unhappiness can leech away any feeling of engagement, leaving the person not caring about their work.
So even if you want an engaged workforce, you still need to focus on making them happy because engagement without happiness is not sustainable.
3: Ultimately, it’s about performance – and happiness drives better performance
As I stated above, some fans of engagement argue that it matters more because it directly drives effort and performance. They also argue that employees can be happy but not productive. Both of these arguments reveal a poor knowledge of the research in happiness at work.
Sure, engagement leads to better performance – but given the definition above that includes commitment and extra effort, that’s almost a tautology.
Furthermore, we know from a large amount of research, that happy employees perform much better. Ed Diener, one of the world’s leading happiness researchers summed it up like this:
In the workplace we know that happiness causes more-productive and more-creative workers.
If you know academics, you know how careful they are about using the word “causes.” In this case, we know that happiness at work causes higher:
Productivity – happy people get more work done with the same resources.
Creativity – feeling good makes your mind more able to think of new ideas and approaches.
Intrinsic motivation – happy people don’t need constant external motivators like bonuses or threats; they want to do good work.
Loyalty – happy employees care about the company and stay longer in their jobs.
Discretionary effort – employees who like their jobs go above and beyond for the customers, their co-workers and the workplace.
So employee happiness has been shown to directly cause increased performance.
4: Happiness causes engagement
You’ll notice that both loyalty and discretionary effort were part of the definition of engagement that we presented above.
Given that (as we saw in the previous section) happy employees are more loyal and are more likely to go the extra mile, it’s clear that happiness doesn’t only cause better performance – happiness also directly causes engagement.
Of course, the effects are circular and engagement and happiness will cause each other. But given the results above as well as the fact that engagement cannot last in the absence of happiness, it seems clear to me that happiness causes engagement more than engagement causes happiness.
Gallup does a lot of great work on employee engagement and their Q12 survey is one of my favorite metrics. They also acknowledge that many factors play into engagement, including happiness / well-being, writing:
Leaders have to think about everything from culture to well-being to purpose and meaning — and make it all come to life in a personalized way for employees.
The upshot
Engagement is a great concept but ignoring employee happiness in the pursuit of engagement makes no sense.
At the very least, sustainable engagement requires happiness at work, meaning you can’t ignore the happiness aspect.
When do people feel “passionate about their work, committed to the workplace and give discretionary effort?” When they’re happy at work!
So if you want engaged employees, focus on making them happy and engagement will follow.
Most managers have realized by now that happy workplaces are more productive, more creative, attract better talent and make more money.
So if you were a well-meaning manager or HR person looking to capitalize on this and create a happier workplace, you might be tempted to start by asking your employees some version of this question:
“What would make you happier at work?”
It seems like a great place to start. To make people happier, ask them what they want and them give them that. Right?
Similarly if you ask employees what will make them happier at work you will most likely get responses like:
A raise
A promotion
A bonus
A gym in the office
Free fruit
Free lunches
But while all of this sounds perfectly reasonable (indeed, you might give some of the same answers if asked the same question), we know from the research that these factors don’t make employees any happier at work. Just to be clear: We cannot ignore them when making workplaces better, because these factors can absolutely make people unhappy when they’re unfair. But once they are fair, increasing them further does not increase happiness at all.
This explains why many organizations spend a ton of time and money on every perk imaginable and employees are still not happy.
Quite simply: giving employees what they ask for is doomed to fail, if they don’t know what to ask for. And they don’t.
What we need to do instead, is help people discover for themselves what really makes them happy at work and there’s a much better question for that:
Tell me about a recent good experience at work that made you happy.
This may look like essentially the same question as the one above so why is this one better? With the previous question (What would make you happy at work) we only get at the things people think will make them happy.
With the latter question, we ask about specific previous experiences that caused happiness. This means that we get directly at what really works.
I have used this question in hundreds of speeches all over the world and never once has anyone told a story of getting a raise, a promotion or a perk. Never once has anyone said “I was really happy last Thursday because I got a free apple.”
The one exception was when I did a workshop at Lego and an employee shared this example:
Every week our team gets a new box of fruit and there’s always only one banana in it. If I get there in time to get that one banana, it makes me really happy!
I’m 98% sure he was kidding!
Invariably, when people reflect on this question their stories fall into two categories.
They either talk about doing good work, achieving great results or making a positive difference for others. This includes things like:
I had a complicated problem on a project and found a really creative solution for it.
A customer liked my work so much they sent me an email with tons of positive feedback.
I helped a coworker by sharing advice and knowledge.
Or they talk about moments of personal connection at work, like:
I came back to the office from parental leave last week and so many people on my team welcomed me back with smiles and hugs.
I had a bad day and my manager noticed and did her best to help me.
We celebrated a team member’s birthday last week with cake and coffee and had a great time together.
Very often their stories contain both elements. That’s why we talk about results and relationships being the two main sources of happiness at work.
The upshot
Don’t ask your employees what will make them happy – because they probably have completely the wrong idea and giving them what they ask for won’t work. Instead, help them connect to past positive experiences because those are a much more reliable predictor of future happiness. And then work on doing simple daily actions that promote a feeling of results and relationships.
You will often see Denmark listed as one of the “happiest countries on the planet.” Interestingly Danes are not only happy at home, they’re also happy at work and according to most studies of worker satisfaction among nations, the happiest employees in the world are in Denmark.
Here’s just one data point: Gallup found that 18% of American workers are actively disengaged, meaning they are “emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be productive.” The same number for Danish workers is only 10%.
But why are Danish workers so much happier than their counterparts around the world? Here are five fundamental differences that explain what’s going on.
1: REASONABLE WORKING HOURS
I once talked to an American who had gotten a job as a manager at a Danish company. Wanting to prove his worth, he did what he had always done and put in 60 to 70 hours a week. After a month, his manager invited him to a meeting. He was fully expecting to be praised for his hard work, but instead he was asked “Why do you work so much? Is something wrong? Do you have a problem delegating? What can we do to fix this?”
Some non-Danes wonder if Danes ever work. Not only do Danes tend to leave work at a reasonable hour most days, but they also get five to six weeks of vacation per year, several national holidays and up to a year of paid maternity/paternity leave. While the average American works 1,780 hours and the average South Korean 2,024 hours per year, the average Dane only works 1,408, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) statistics. Danes also have more leisure hours than any other OECD workers and the link between sufficient leisure and happiness is well established in the research.
The difference to other countries is stark. Many companies around the world celebrate overwork as a sign of commitment. “You have to put in the hours” is the message in the mistaken belief that the more hours you work, the more work you get done. We call this “The Cult of Overwork.” Danish companies, on the other hand, recognize that employees also have a life outside of work and that working 80 hours a week is bad for both employees and the bottom line.
2: LOW POWER DISTANCE
In many countries, if your boss gives you an order, you pretty much do what you’re told. In a Danish workplace, extremely few direct orders are ever given and employees are more likely to view them as suggestions.
Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede has quantified the culture in more than 100 countries on several parameters, one of which is “power distance.” A high power distance means that bosses are undisputed kings whose every word is law. Danish workplaces–with a score of 18-have the lowest power distance in the world. Just for comparison, Belgium has a power distance of 65, China clocks in at 80 and Malaysia holds the world record at 100.
By law, any Danish workplace with more than 35 employees must open up seats on the board for employees. This means that Danish employees experience more autonomy and are more empowered at work. Here’s just one example: By law, any Danish workplace with more than 35 employees must open up seats on the board for employees, who are elected to the board by their peers and serve on an equal footing and with same voting powers as all other board members.
3: GENEROUS UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS
In Denmark, losing your job is not the end of the world. In fact, unemployment insurance seems too good to be true, giving workers up to 90% of their original salary for two years. In the U.S., for instance, losing your job can easily lead to financial disaster and loss of health insurance. This leads to job lock i.e. staying in a job you hate because you can’t afford to leave.
Simply put: If you’re a Dane and you don’t like your job, you can quit that job without risking serious financial problems, forcing companies to treat their employees well or risk losing them.
4: CONSTANT TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT
Since the mid-1800s, Denmark has focused on life-long education of its workers. This policy continues to this day, with an extremely elaborate set of government, union, and corporate policies that allow almost any employee who so desires to attend paid training and pick up new skills. It’s called an “active labor market policy,” and Denmark spends more on these types of programs than any other country in the OECD.
This lets Danish workers constantly grow and develop and helps them stay relevant (not to mention stay employed) even in a changing work environment. It also makes their jobs richer and more interesting.
5: A FOCUS ON HAPPINESS
Here’s a word that exists only in the Scandinavian languages: Arbejdsglæde. Arbejde means work and glæde means happiness, so arbejdsglæde is “happiness at work.” This word is not in common use in any other language on the planet.
Many people around the world hate their jobs and consider this to be perfectly normal.
For instance, where we Scandinavians have arbejdsglæde, the Japanese instead have karoshi, which means “Death from overwork.” And this is no coincidence; there is a word for it in Danish because Danish workplaces have a long-standing tradition of wanting to make their employees happy. To most Danes, a job isn’t just a way to get paid; we fully expect to enjoy ourselves at work.
In other countries, the attitude towards work is often very different. A few years ago I gave a speech in Chicago, and an audience member told me that “Of course I hate my job, that’s why they pay me to do it!” Many people around the world hate their jobs and consider this to be perfectly normal. Similarly, many workplaces around the world do little or nothing to create happiness among employees, sticking to the philosophy that “If you’re enjoying yourself, you’re not working hard enough.”
THE UPSHOT
I’m not trying to paint Danish companies as utopias for workers and their international counterparts as tyrannical hellholes. There are bad Danish workplaces and stellar non-Danish ones–Zappos and Google are two that I’ve personally visited and studied.
But studies have uncovered a number of systemic and cultural differences between Denmark and the rest of the world that serve to explain why Danish workers are on average so much happier.
This goes far beyond happiness. We know from any number of studies that happy workers are more productive and innovative and that consequently, happy companies have happier customers and make more money. This may help explain why Danish workers are among the most productive in the OECD and why the Danish economy continues to do so well.
If you search for “procrastination” on google you’ll find a massive number of articles on how to stop procrastinating and get stuff done.
These articles will tell you that there is only one reliable way for you to get stuff done:
Check your todo-list for the next item
Complete item no matter what it is
Go to step 1
The message here is that if only you had enough willpower, backbone, self-control and discipline this is how you would work too.
Well guess what: Many people don’t work that way. Sometimes you’re in the mood for a task and doing it is ridiculously easy and a lot of fun. Sometimes doing the very same task feels worse than walking barefoot over burning-hot, acid-covered, broken glass and forcing yourself to do it anyway is a frustrating exercise in futility.
Sometimes procrastinating is exactly the right thing to do at a particular moment. Sadly, this is largely ignored by the procrastination-is-a-sign-of-weakness, the-devil-finds-work-for-idle-hands crowd.
An example: Sometimes I have a great idea for an article, but I can’t get it written. I try writing it one way, I try another but I just can’t get it finished. Invariably, I end up procrastinating. Suddenly while I’m procrastinating, the idea I was missing comes to me and the whole article is suddenly clear in my mind. When I next sit down to write it, it takes no time and writing it is a pure pleasure.
I could’ve forced myself to write that article the first time around – if I’d had enough discipline! But it would have been a struggle all the way and the result wouldn’t have been half as good. I can just hear people crying “Well, your articles still aren’t half as good” :) That’s another discussion!
For me, procrastination is just another tool I use. A way to recharge and get ideas. The important thing is to procrastinate effectively.
Here’s how you do it.
1: Procrastinate without guilt
Do not beat yourself up for procrastinating. Everybody does it once in a while. It doesn’t make you a lazy bastard or a bad person.
If you leave a task for later, but spend all your time obsessing about the task you’re not doing, it does nothing good for you. So procrastinate without guilt.
2: Procrastinate 100%
Do you know those people who procrastinate from some important task – and all they can talk or think about is the task they’re not doing. Often to the point of obsession!
Don’t. Throw yourself 100% into whatever it is you are doing, whether you’re vacuuming, watching TV, reading, surfing the web or out drinking with your friends. Do it and enjoy it to the max.
3: Choose to procrastinate
Don’t let procrastination sneak up on you, so that you suddenly find that you’re doing something other than you should be. Instead, choose consciously to not work on your current task. Instead of fighting it, say to yourself “I will now procrastinate”.
This way procrastination isn’t something that happens to you, something that you’re powerless to control. As if it ever could be :) This way you’re in charge and procrastination is a tool you use.
4: Ask yourself why you procrastinate
There can be many good reasons to procrastinate:
Some crucial ideas, notions, thoughts may come to you only when you’re not working on your project.
Effective procrastination recharges your batteries and gives you new energy.
Maybe there’s something else you could be doing instead and procrastinating means you get it done.
Maybe whatever it is you’re supposed to do, turns out to be irrelevant or even a bad idea. Maybe the reason you procrastinated was, that your subconscious knew this before your conscious mind.
Or maybe – and most importantly – you just hate doing whatever it is you’re supposed to do and that’s why you can’t make yourself do it. Many people hate their jobs (20% according to some studies) and constant procrastination can be a sign that you’re one of them. In that case, take it seriously, and do something about it.
Working non-stop means missing out on all of this. When you find yourself procrastinating, ask yourself why. Don’t just accept the traditional answer: “There’s something wrong with me, I’m a bad, lazy person”.
5: Take responsibility for procrastinating
When you choose to procrastinate, make sure to update your deadlines and commitments. Let people know, that your project will not be finished on time and give them a new deadline.
Procrastinate now. I dare you!
Procrastination is not bad in itself. Do it right, and it’s a way to be more efficient and have more fun with what you’re working on.
In fact, I challenge you to procrastinate this very moment. Pick a task that you should be working on right now, but where your heart isn’t really in it. Then, rather than work half-heartedly on this task, procrastinate fully and consciously as described above.
Notice how it changes how you think about your task and what it does for you when you procrastinate 100% and without feelings of guilt.
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