Engineering Your Workload To Eliminate Stress

00:00:00.000 | The topic of today's deep dive is the 20% paradox.

00:00:05.000 | Now I wanted to choose a topic that was gonna be relevant

00:00:11.000 | to the interview that follows in this episode.

00:00:13.520 | So stick around for the interview that follows

00:00:16.120 | because you're gonna see some deep connections

00:00:18.960 | between what my guest has to say

00:00:20.320 | and this topic I wanted to tackle here up front in the show.

00:00:24.680 | So what is the 20% paradox?

00:00:28.320 | It is the observation that if you take a knowledge worker

00:00:32.920 | who is burnt out or stressed about their work,

00:00:35.800 | which let's be honest is a large percentage

00:00:38.640 | of knowledge workers right now,

00:00:40.760 | and you measure how much work are they doing

00:00:44.360 | above the threshold of sustainability.

00:00:46.960 | So the level where if your work is below this volume,

00:00:51.260 | it's pretty sustainable, you're not super stressed about it,

00:00:53.320 | your job is just what it is.

00:00:54.800 | How much work are they doing above that threshold?

00:00:57.600 | What you find consistently is that it's gonna be

00:01:00.200 | somewhere around 20% too much work.

00:01:05.020 | Not 60%, not 200%, not 100%,

00:01:09.680 | but it's always right around 20%.

00:01:12.360 | Now there are people who do, let's say 100% too much work.

00:01:15.440 | So if we, just for the sake of round numbers,

00:01:17.400 | say nine to five, five days a week,

00:01:21.540 | if your work fits comfortably in there,

00:01:23.980 | that's pretty sustainable, we're used to that,

00:01:26.040 | we'll be okay with it.

00:01:26.980 | So it's possible some people work 100 hour weeks

00:01:29.680 | and they need all 100 hours to get things done.

00:01:32.280 | I know some people like that.

00:01:34.120 | That's very rare, right?

00:01:36.000 | Most people it's about 20%.

00:01:37.400 | It's like me today, I'm a little stressed out today

00:01:40.360 | because I have probably one hour

00:01:43.320 | too much stuff on my schedule.

00:01:45.080 | If there was one hour worth of work removed,

00:01:47.320 | like an appointment removed from today,

00:01:49.640 | from my schedule, then we would be okay.

00:01:53.960 | I'd have time to get everything done,

00:01:55.480 | I'd have some margin, the day would end at the normal time

00:01:58.940 | and I'd be okay.

00:01:59.780 | I don't have quite enough time after I record

00:02:02.300 | today's episode, I'm running out the door, 20% too much.

00:02:05.520 | And this is what you find more or less

00:02:08.620 | when you study stressed out knowledge workers.

00:02:11.980 | So why do we fall?

00:02:13.220 | Why is the source of stress always this,

00:02:16.860 | coming from this relatively narrow quantity of overwork?

00:02:20.820 | Well, the wrong answer, the answer we tell ourselves

00:02:25.820 | when we interrogate our burnout is that I'm being asked

00:02:29.940 | to do the amount of work I'm being asked to do

00:02:32.420 | is about 20% too much.

00:02:34.540 | I just look, I can't just say no to my boss,

00:02:36.460 | this is what's on my plate, what's on my plate

00:02:38.140 | is about 20% too much, it's I'm being asked to do too much.

00:02:41.740 | The reality is though in almost every case,

00:02:44.460 | you're saying no to most things that you're asked to do.

00:02:49.820 | Most people don't realize this,

00:02:51.420 | but you're turning things down implicitly or explicitly

00:02:55.460 | through direct conversation or indirect action all the time.

00:03:00.280 | And this kind of makes sense, right?

00:03:02.780 | Like what are the chances that of all the different people

00:03:05.660 | in your life, in your professional life

00:03:07.260 | who could make requests of you,

00:03:08.420 | who can put work on your plate?

00:03:10.220 | What are the chances that it just works out

00:03:12.820 | that all of the different requests

00:03:14.340 | that they throw your direction in an ad hoc manner

00:03:16.620 | with just Slack chats and grabbing you at a meeting

00:03:19.180 | or emails, what's the chances that when you add up

00:03:21.260 | all that work, it ends up to be exactly about 20%

00:03:24.180 | too many hours?

00:03:25.740 | That's not gonna happen,

00:03:27.100 | that would be a cosmic coincidence.

00:03:28.540 | That's rolling 17 dice and having them all come up threes.

00:03:33.020 | What's really happening is that you're getting asked

00:03:34.740 | to do things all the time,

00:03:36.620 | if you really added up the work of all the things

00:03:38.820 | you could be doing and all the things you could be accepting

00:03:41.140 | it would be more hours than there are in the week,

00:03:43.980 | it would be impossible, you're saying no to most things

00:03:46.500 | and the things you say yes to ends up being

00:03:49.740 | about 20% too much.

00:03:51.260 | The reason why I think this happens,

00:03:55.380 | and I've talked about this before on the show,

00:03:58.140 | but let's make it really clear here,

00:04:00.620 | is not about the logistics of work,

00:04:04.940 | it's not about administrative philosophies,

00:04:08.660 | it's not about time management strategies,

00:04:10.700 | it's about psychology.

00:04:13.900 | It is difficult for humans to say no to other humans

00:04:17.540 | that are making a request of them,

00:04:19.940 | and this would make complete sense if we wanna put on

00:04:23.020 | our somewhat suspect pop evolutionary psychology hat,

00:04:27.220 | this makes sense, right?

00:04:28.620 | I wanna avoid just those stories here,

00:04:29.820 | but this makes sense because we're a tribal species,

00:04:32.700 | we're used to living in a small tribe of people

00:04:34.780 | who are related to us that we're fiercely loyal to.

00:04:38.580 | In the tribal context that dominated

00:04:40.780 | for the first 300,000 years of our species existence,

00:04:44.220 | requests were probably pretty serious,

00:04:46.700 | and there would be a real social consequence to saying no.

00:04:49.220 | When your tribe member says,

00:04:50.580 | "I need you to watch my back as I attack this mammoth,"

00:04:53.740 | if you say no, that's a problem,

00:04:56.420 | you're gonna get a rock to the back of the head.

00:04:58.740 | As you can tell, I know a lot of really good details

00:05:01.420 | about Paleolithic life.

00:05:02.700 | All right, so we take requests from people we know

00:05:06.020 | in our tribe seriously, so it's very difficult to say no.

00:05:08.740 | Okay, this is a mismatch, of course,

00:05:10.220 | for a world of 700 other employees in your organization

00:05:14.100 | and human resources and other types of groups

00:05:16.700 | within your company that all need different things from you

00:05:18.700 | and who can make requests with basically no friction

00:05:20.860 | by sending you a quick email.

00:05:22.260 | That brain, that Paleolithic brain is a mismatch here

00:05:25.420 | 'cause here, it's not life and death.

00:05:28.700 | Someone asking you to come participate in a panel

00:05:32.300 | is something that it's not a big deal if you say no to.

00:05:34.500 | No one's gonna get a rock to the back of their head,

00:05:36.820 | no one's gonna get gored by a mammoth,

00:05:38.740 | but our brain is concerned.

00:05:40.540 | So we have a hard time saying no,

00:05:42.100 | it's a psychological problem.

00:05:44.180 | What helps if we feel overloaded and stressed?

00:05:47.700 | This gives you, from a internal psychological perspective,

00:05:53.260 | coverage to say no.

00:05:54.640 | Not coverage to the other person, coverage to yourself,

00:05:59.180 | your brain, your Paleolithic brain.

00:06:02.460 | We can't say no, we can't say no.

00:06:03.620 | You're like, I am so stressed.

00:06:05.100 | Like, all right, I mean, we gotta say no.

00:06:08.820 | We're overloaded.

00:06:09.740 | I mean, look, this is an extreme circumstance.

00:06:11.540 | I normally would say yes, but there's these other factors

00:06:13.820 | like our cortisol's up, our schedule's packed.

00:06:16.220 | Like with reluctance, we have to say no.

00:06:19.360 | I really do think, this is a big source of the 20% rule,

00:06:22.520 | is that we engineer, we implicitly engineer

00:06:25.540 | the volume of our acceptances to get us a workload

00:06:27.660 | that's just heavy enough that we're in a persistent state

00:06:29.820 | of low-grade stress, and then that is where

00:06:32.340 | we then feel comfortable saying no to what follows.

00:06:34.400 | The reason why we don't curve our workload 20% less

00:06:37.580 | below the sustainability threshold

00:06:40.100 | is because when our work is sustainable,

00:06:43.380 | we don't have the psychological cover to say no.

00:06:45.380 | It's a self-reinforcing feedback network

00:06:48.780 | that has a convergent steady state

00:06:52.860 | at the stressful side of that threshold.

00:06:56.620 | So I think this is really important.

00:06:58.980 | The other person doesn't care as much as you think

00:07:00.900 | when you're politely saying no,

00:07:03.000 | because you've already said no to them probably seven times

00:07:05.020 | for other things, you just didn't realize it.

00:07:07.260 | They don't care, they don't know the difference.

00:07:09.980 | Your CV, your resume, your bosses,

00:07:11.900 | you think they really would know the difference

00:07:13.440 | between if you spent 20% less time.

00:07:15.500 | That's not gonna show up.

00:07:16.940 | There's so much noise in how many things get accomplished

00:07:19.500 | or this thing took this much more time than this thing.

00:07:21.420 | It's all a little bit apples to oranges.

00:07:23.440 | 20% less work doesn't necessarily even show up

00:07:26.380 | in a way that anyone is ever gonna notice.

00:07:28.540 | The outside world can't see things at that granularity,

00:07:32.300 | but it can make all the difference

00:07:33.560 | to your personal sustainability, your personal satisfaction.

00:07:36.560 | It's a small epsilon that if you close it,

00:07:39.640 | lots of good things happen,

00:07:40.800 | but it's psychologically difficult to do.

00:07:43.180 | So partially this is just expository.

00:07:48.380 | It's a theory.

00:07:50.080 | We're all stressed, but not like completely

00:07:53.480 | 100-hour-a-week overloaded because it's a coping mechanism.

00:07:56.760 | Partly this is also advisory.

00:07:58.760 | If we understand the 20% paradox,

00:08:01.000 | maybe we will be a little bit more emboldened

00:08:03.900 | to just shave that extra epsilon of work off

00:08:07.060 | and fall back to a more sustainable place.

00:08:09.260 | When we understand that we actually say no

00:08:10.980 | implicitly all the time, right?

00:08:14.100 | We do not have 60 hours of work

00:08:16.240 | exactly being put on our plate.

00:08:17.460 | We have 200 hours being put on our plate

00:08:19.420 | and we say no to most of it.

00:08:20.780 | Then saying no a couple more times is not so fraught,

00:08:23.720 | but it's gonna make all the difference in the world.

00:08:25.660 | It's gonna be one less meeting today,

00:08:28.040 | ending your day and moving to a shutdown ritual

00:08:30.260 | one hour earlier than normal,

00:08:31.580 | starting your day one hour later,

00:08:33.220 | one more project off your plate,

00:08:35.980 | one more year in between book projects.

00:08:38.100 | I don't know, whatever adds up to 20%

00:08:39.860 | in your particular professional world,

00:08:41.740 | it can make all the difference.

00:08:42.820 | So anyways, keep the 20% paradox in mind.

00:08:45.620 | It's a big driver of stress.

00:08:48.600 | It's largely psychological.

00:08:50.460 | Psychological problems have internal solutions.

00:08:53.180 | So we have some hope here that we can make a difference.

00:08:57.800 | (upbeat music)

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Engineering Your Workload To Eliminate Stress

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