The reward for hard work is more work

A few decades ago, I was a young upstart in high school, challenging for university credit in calculus. My teacher at the time was exceptional at making calculus entertaining and accessible. She seemed to have a song or rhyme for every difficult equation you could think of. My teacher would teach these jingles to the class as a clever way to help us remember how to solve these equations. For the class, we felt like we were back in preschool while singing these songs, but we didn't mind. The results of this strategy spoke for itself. Our class' average on the final exam outperformed that of the best private school in the city.

In addition to her handy jingles, my teacher was also a wellspring of nifty aphorisms. One of my favourites from her was, "Every good math student is lazy." This statement refers to doing the least amount of work necessary to solve an equation. While it is insufficient to simply write down the answer, overcomplicating the process leaves more room for error. We could get the answer right, but get marked wrong for a flawed process. In this sense, less is more, and quite often a more elegant solution is more correct in the end.

The essence of this strategy is also found in the age-old aphorism, "Work smarter, not harder." That is, creating efficiencies in our lives frees time for more productive pursuits. Despite being aware of such heuristics, there are still several aspects of our lives in which we prefer to work harder instead of smarter.

The problem with working hard#

There are far too many people in the world who would prefer to work a second job instead of pursuing a side gig. On the surface, a second job seems like an obvious way to supplement income. It is also the most culturally acceptable way to do so. However, this is a flawed strategy for a number of reasons.

Working a second job caps your revenue, limits your ability to scale (working two jobs is difficult, working three is unsustainable), and depletes your most precious resource, time. In contrast, a side gig might not make much at first, but it is less likely to deplete limited time and energy, since it would be more aligned with one's passions. With the right product/market fit, the sky's the limit where revenue and scale are concerned.

Culturally, entrepreneurship is still stigmatized if the entrepreneur isn't already successful. This is off-putting to many who would otherwise pursue it. For this reason, it appears to be smart to work that second job, despite it being smarter to have a side gig instead.

Another example of working hard and not smart exists in the type of office environment that seems to always have a fire to put out. Organizations that suffer from this kind of environment often find themselves in a never ending cycle of busywork. For every unit of work completed, there seems to be two more waiting in the backlog.

There are many possible reasons why this happens. One reason is that the type of work that gets rewarded isn't the kind that solves a priori problems. That is, tasks that take time away from fire fighting, with the intention to discover and potentially extinguish the source of it, is seen as low performance or 'not being a team player'.

Most of us who have worked as software developers have experienced an environment such as this. At one organization I worked at, this mentality was encouraged and thus codified into the executive mantra, "The reward for hard work is more work." When I first heard this phrase, I was reasonably disgusted. This is garbage, I thought, the reward for hard work should be getting paid!

I would later realize that I was wrong, but for the right reason. There should definitely be reasonable compensation for the work that one performs. But if that work isn't completed efficiently and selectively, it creates more work than is necessary.

The aforementioned aphorism on the reward for hard work was used as a twisted motivational tool in my past place of employment. In actuality, it's a warning. The reward for hard work is indeed more work, but the output of that busywork often translates to wasted time, resources, and opportunities. Yet many of us still find ourselves in a cycle of chaos when we decide we have no other choice but to work hard. This happens for a number of reasons.

Mismatching goals and priorities#

First, we sometimes end up working harder than we have to when our goals and priorities are mismatched. I once worked under an individual who was hyper-focused on performance metrics. In particular, speed was one metric he gave the utmost attention to. It didn't matter that most of the defects in our codebase were the result of rushed tasks that accumulated technical debt. Taking a bit of extra time to pay down that debt in the midst of related tasks was seen as low performance. Over time, the team became incentivized to only complete backlog tasks, and then only addressed defects in hindsight.

It didn't occur to my manager that investing time to address technical debt that slowed the team down would help increase productivity. He was so laser-focused on speed that he was blind to everything else. Especially how dissatisfied his team had become with his management style. In the end, that company was unable to achieve its intended performance goals, and was eventually bought out by their primary competitor. While high performance is a good ideal to pursue, we will never achieve it if we focus on the wrong metrics while deluding ourselves otherwise.

Failing to ask the right questions#

Second, we often fail to ask the right questions. What often occurs in software development is that a problem is encountered where there isn't an obvious solution. It could be that the documentation on the issue is poor. Or it could be that we don't know what question to ask that would provide us with more information.

A good indication of this happening is if you find yourself saying, "I have no idea what I'm doing." This is normal to experience for any task that is novel. However, remaining in this state will only trigger increasing anxiety, and it's maladaptive.

Resigning yourself to ignorance is another form of failing to ask the right questions via inaction. A process exists to remove oneself from this paralysis, and it involves finding the question. One way to find the question that helps solve your problem is to ask dumb questions.

My personal philosophy is that there are no real dumb questions, because every question brings us closer to being enlightened. A 'dumb' question can help us gauge how much we are on the mark of a particular issue. Once we have an idea of where our level of knowledge rests, we can then ask increasingly more informed questions that bring us closer to the answer we're looking for.

Asking 'dumb' questions is like using the process of elimination to correctly navigate difficult situations. If we already have some level of knowledge on our problem space, we can start off asking questions about what we know as it relates to what we don't know. Some of these will be 'dumb' questions. Along the way, we will pick up bits of relevant information that expand our circle of understanding, which then enables more informed questions. A few iterations of this process will eventually reveal the solution to our problem. This strategy is best suited for search engine queries. But it can also work in person as long as the social environment is non-judgmental, and the communication pathways are limited in scope.

This process is summarized succinctly in this episode of the Soul of Enterprise with the discussion of the Mother of all Questions or MOAQ. This is an imponderable question which asks, What is the question that if you had the answer would set you free? It's imponderable since you'll be unable to answer the question and forever be satisfied with its results. This question is meant to keep you asking questions that provide you with increasing levels of freedom. Finding the question, as I have described above, is a subset of the MOAQ that is limited to the scope of a specific problem, as opposed to a generalized existential one. Being able to ask the right questions is critical to working smarter.

Being blind to the obvious#

Third, we're prone to being blind to the obvious. We're all familiar with the idiom, "right under your nose." We're naturally conditioned to search every location other than those close by for something we've lost or information we don't have. This is because we erroneously assume that if what we were looking for is close by, we would find it instantly.

Much of the time this isn't the case; the first place we should have looked is often the last. This gives us the feeling that we've wasted time and effort, especially if this is a recurring issue. The solution to this problem is similar to that of the last section where we ask ourselves 'dumb' questions.

We simply need to invoke a variant of Hanlon's Razor on ourselves. We should assume we're ignorant of something fundamental to our problem, rather than assuming some external force created the problem. Maybe I did leave my glasses on my head? I might never have lost my wallet before but maybe I did this time? Maybe the person I'm talking to actually does know something I don't?

All examples of being unaware of the obvious involve the inability to modulate our ego and challenge our own assumptions at the soonest responsible moment. Failing to do so creates far too much effort and additional problems before being able to find the information or object we're looking for. It's far better to look like a fool for having glasses on your head than to deal with a torn apart house caused by trying to find those glasses.

Refusal to abandon fruitless efforts#

Fourth, we fail to recognize when an effort is fruitless and should be abandoned. A perfect example of this problem is the tendency for some people to squeeze every penny. Grocery bill off by 23 cents? Gotta drive back and fight customer service, right?! While it's definitely a good thing to pay detailed attention to your cash flow, there comes a point where that attention costs more than it's worth.

It makes sense for some people to deposit aluminum cans for a living, as the money from that could mean food for another day. The time spent doing so results in serious opportunity costs for others who may have a more lucrative source of income. For most people, the minimal returns from recycling cans limits that activity to once every few months. The currency is feeling good about doing the environment a solid, and having enough pocket change to buy more of a favourite beverage. Aiming to recycle cans for anything more than that as a person with means is pointless.

There are two dynamics in play here, that of diminished marginal returns and loss aversion. We often pursue fruitless activities out of an irrational fear of losing or missing out on something valuable, or when we feel too invested in that activity to quit. This happens because we attribute too much value to the returns of that activity beyond the point of profitability. When we don't establish a profitability boundary, we risk wasting resources on chasing what amounts to table scraps.

One example of a profitability boundary is refusing to buy into a sale when the discount is less than a certain percentage. For myself, I don't consider it a good sale unless the discount is at least 40% for low priced items and 30% for higher priced ones. If the discount is less than that, I won't bother with the sale unless I really need the product at that moment.

Another good example of a profitability boundary is The 5 Dollar Rule (see my disclaimer on the source). The short of it is that you don't expend any mental energy on any decision that costs less than $5. The 5 Dollar Rule saves you time and energy to deal with more expensive or profitable problems, and ensures that you don't get caught up in minutiae. Establishing a boundary where you can quit a pointless or unprofitable activity is a very effective way to stop working harder and start working smarter instead.

Conclusion#

What the four points above have in common is the extent to which one is willing to be lazy. It is the need to _not _work hard that reveals solutions or insights that make better use of our time and resources, or allow us to work more effectively within our constraints.

I blame the 20th century's work and personality ethic for this problem. The generations that came of age last century tend to attribute hard work to a noble character. When they meet, they ask themselves, "What do you do?" as if one's profession can succinctly describe what is otherwise a complex web of individual experiences, emotions, and relationships.

Under such a mentality, it is difficult to see hard work as the potential cause of inefficiency. Boomers, and those generations adjacent, are the quintessential Boxer from Animal Farm, whose mantra of, "I will work harder," is the solution to all problems. And if subsequent cohorts, such as Millennials, face systemic economic issues, the cause of those problems must be that they are simply not working hard enough.

Millennials, and those born afterwards, are actually working as hard or harder for less pay when adjusted for inflation. I can attest to that as an information technology worker who had been forced to work 16+ hours in a day several times with the expectation of showing up to work the next day.

The problem isn't that the young generations aren't working hard enough, it's that they aren't working smart enough. The age of automation is challenging younger generations to find different, smarter ways of working. It is detrimental to adopt the work ethic of generations past and expect to succeed in life in the present. The playing field has changed, and we must all change with it.

To this day, I always remember, "Every good math student is lazy," when I approach any difficult or significantly large task. To me, this aphorism is my first defense against creating more work for myself by choosing to work harder instead of smarter.