All right, well, I thought we'd get started today with something I haven't done in recent weeks, but I miss which is a deep dive. The deep dive I want to do today is on the question, why are we burnt out? Now this deep dive is drawing from a New Yorker article that I published a couple weeks ago, it was a New Yorker article where I was introducing to the New Yorker audience this idea of slow productivity that we have talked about here on this show, but I was also using this article as an excuse to help refine my thinking on that topic.

Now I opened that article talking about a bill that has been proposed in the US Congress. It was originally written by a California representative, Mark Takano, and has since been endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, that's a hundred different congressmen and women. And this was a bill that was arguing that the federal work week, so the federally recognized work week, should go down from 40 hours to 32.

I opened my article talking about this bill. Now, reducing the federally recognized work week down to roughly four days would most directly impact people who are hourly workers, because technically what that means is that if you work beyond the federal work week number of hours, you have to get paid overtime.

So salaried workers, and most knowledge worker types are salaried, wouldn't be directly impacted by this law. But as Representative Takano made clear, he also had overworked computer screen and email types in his mind when he put together this bill. If you change the federally recognized work week, there would be a pressure even on salaried positions to think about reducing the length of the work week.

There would be other things that would happen, such as many government knowledge worker style jobs would go to that work week. There would be a lot of pressures. And he acknowledged this in quotes he had about the bill, that he was keeping these computer screen and email style workers in mind when he proposed this bill.

He actually responded to my New Yorker article and emphasized that point. Yes, he had knowledge workers in mind, among other constituencies, of course, when writing that bill. All right, so why are we considering potentially a four-day work week? Well, the issue is burnout. If you dive into the data on what they're calling the great resignation, something which I've written about before, but if you dive into the data, what you see is, yes, there's a lot of people who are quitting their jobs, but not really among the ranks of knowledge workers, the heavy turnover seems to be happening more in service and hospitality type sectors.

What we are seeing, the data is clear about this, in the knowledge work sector, the sector of people who use Zoom all day, what you are seeing there is maybe not a huge rash of quitting, but burnout on the rise. There's many different ways you can measure this that all seem to be coming together to the same point, which is knowledge workers are burning out.

And this burnout got much worse during the pandemic. So this four-day work week was being proposed in part in response to the burnout that you're seeing among knowledge workers. So I opened my article on that point, but then I gave the kicker, which is, I don't think it's going to help them.

I think there are clearly other sectors of the economy where reducing the recognized work week would be useful, could create good, but it's not going to solve what is burning out knowledge workers. All right, so well, this brings us to the question of what is burning out knowledge workers?

If it's not, they have to work too long. What is it that is burning out knowledge workers? And here my argument was that you need to look past how many hours are you expected to work and instead look at what I call work volume. If you take an individual worker, what is the total number of commitments that is currently on their plate, be them big or small, major projects, just need to get back with someone with some information and everything in between.

What is the total amount of commitments on their plate? This is the work volume. My argument is that when work volume gets too large, burnout follows. There's two reasons for this. The first reason is neurological. We actually have in our brain, and by we, I mean our species, because this is unique to Homo sapiens as far as we're concerned.

We've studied similar primate cousins like macaque monkeys and cannot find the same brain region. We have a region in our brain that finds what makes humans humans that specializes in looking at what we need to get done and making a long-term plan. You know, it's getting cold. We need our cave to be ready for the winter, whatever that means in 100,000 years ago.

Let's make a plan. Let's execute the plan. We're motivated to actually pursue the plan. We feel good when the plan is executed. This is fundamental to human nature. It is why, in some sense, this fundamental neurological productivity, why we were able to leverage our brains to really separate from other species, right?

So we're wired to figure out how to do things, how to get things done and to execute it. When you have excessive work volume, what happens is you have more on your plate than this region of your brain can reasonably actually consider and plan how to get it done.

You short-circuit those planning circuits. And when you short-circuit that, it feels really bad. You feel anxious. You feel unnerved. It's just like how we crave sugar. The metabolic processes of our body crave sugar because we have a evolutionary reason to do so. But when we eat seven Snickers bars, it completely overloads our body and bad things happen.

So the same thing. We crave, "Give me something to do. Let me make a plan and execute and feel good." But if we put 75 things on our to-do list, we can't even conceive of how we're going to get all of those things done. We feel bad. All right, so there's a neurological source of burnout here.

My editor at The New Yorker wisely cut that out. I did actually get into some of the actual brain stuff going on in the article, but it got in the way of the narrative. We cut it out. But there is, let's just rest assured, good neurological backing to this point.

The second issue with excessive work volume, and maybe even the worst issue, is what I dub the overhead spiral. So here's the thing. Most non-trivial commitments that you make in a knowledge work setting bring with it a fixed amount of overhead. A fixed amount of overhead that involves you needing to collaborate with other people to get that work done.

So if there's some project that you're supposed to be doing, there's some number of meetings you probably have to have with people who are involved. There's some number of phone calls or emails that have to be sent to gather all the information you will need to get that project done.

This, of course, is very reasonable. Hey, I work in an organization. I'm trying to do this. I'm going to need help from other people. I'm going to need information from other people. So I will have to send some emails. I'll have to have some meetings. Completely reasonable. The issue is everything you are committed to do, however, brings with it its own, in isolation, reasonable amount of this overhead.

So if you increase the number of things that are on your plate, you are responsible for the amount of this overhead begins to grow until it takes over most of your schedule until most of your work. Most of your work time is actually being dedicated to a the meetings that have to happen to touch base on every one of these projects and the back and forth emails and phone calls needed to keep each of these projects moving.

And soon you find yourself doing almost nothing but this overhead work and very little actually gets done. We saw this very clearly early in the pandemic where what happened is when we shifted and by we I'm talking again, knowledge workers right now people who work in offices. And the pandemic began, it created a sudden increase in work volumes because a lot of things had to be figured out and changed when companies went remote.

How do we do this now? How do we do that now? Right? So there's a sudden increase in work volume. The, the metric here is the number of average number of commitments on each worker's plate really went up. So this raised the overhead, the number of meetings that had to happen in the number of emails that had to happen.

What was the result? Quite a few office workers reported to me that they ended up having eight hours zoom days. Back to back to back to back to back to back meetings to talk about work. Why? Because each of these things they now have to do requires a meeting each week and they have enough of these things that those meetings all have to happen.

And soon all they're doing is meetings and no work actually gets done. Well, this is incredibly frustrating and it also leads to burnout. So these two things, the short circuiting of our planning circuit and the overhead spiral, these two things that come along with increased work volume generates burnout.

That's my argument. All right. So now if we look back at this proposition, well, what we need is a four day work week. That's not going to solve burnout because all of those issues of increased work volume are still there. If anything, they're going to get worse. If you take a day off of the week where none of this overhead can happen, then the other days are going to get even more crowded.

And the stress you have from having more things on your plate than your brain can plan, nothing about that stress changes if you're not working on Mondays. You still have all those things. You still can't plan how it's going to get done. So my argument is the issue is not the number of hours we're expected to work.

That is an industrial mindset. If we're looking at industrial work in which the worker has very little autonomy, where after the Taylorism revolution in the early 20th century, you have a small number of people who figure out the best way to execute the work, the best way to build the cars.

They break it down in the steps, they optimize, and then the workers are just told, here's what you should do. Sit here on this assembly line, do that bolt, turn that wrench. In that type of work, where the worker is just doing the same task repetitively, the only knob you have to turn is the number of hours you work.

And so if you are exhausted or burnt out from work, you need to do less work. Reduce the hours, pay more for the time. It makes complete sense. This does not translate to knowledge work. We are not stressed because nine to five is too many hours to be working.

From a physical toil perspective, knowledge work is easy. You're in an air conditioned box on a $700 chair. Looking at a computer screen and doing social media on the side. It is not a toil on our body. Our problem is not I need to get away from that. It is the psychological and logistical weight of overload that comes from these work volumes getting too large.

So the answer is reduce the work volumes. Not reduce the amount of work a company does. I'm not saying that you say, okay, we're going to drastically slash the number of clients we service. We're going to drastically decrease the rate at which our software is produced. No, don't get me wrong about that.

What I'm saying is the amount of work that's on individuals' plates should be reduced down to the point at any one moment that they do not feel their short circuiting of their planning circuits and the overhead of what is currently on their plate is manageable. That means all of the other work that does still have to get done has to be stored somewhere.

Else it is an idea I come back to again and again. It's an idea that is at the core of my most recent book, A World Without Email. Companies and organizations themselves have to do more work towards organizing work. All these different things that may or may not have to get done from the very small to the very big, don't put them on this person's plate.

Have them in a system. And when that person's done with what they're working on, you give them a new thing. They only have one or two things on their plate at a time. You have a lot of admin forum, have admin blocks, you can come to them and sign up and take a slot and work with them to fill out forms.

You can't just throw things on their plate. We cannot underestimate the toil and hardship that comes from just saying, let's distribute all work to individuals and let them figure it out. Reduce work volume, not the rate at which work is accomplished. If anything, people are going to produce more work at higher quality because there's no overhead spiral and they're not stressed out.

But let them do what they do well and then give them the next thing. This is harder for managers. This is harder for organizations. Boo-hoo. Everything about work is hard. All right, we got to figure it out because what we're doing now is not working. All right, so that's my argument.

So I called this approach, reducing the volume of work on people's plates, I called that in the New Yorker piece, slow productivity. And I contrasted this to strategies that are about more cruder approaches, like let's just reduce the number of hours you work. Let's give you more vacation days, et cetera.

That, by contrast, already has a name. That's called slow work. Slow work is an industrial solution. When it comes to computer-aided knowledge work, those industrial solutions won't work. Slow work won't work. We need slow productivity. We have to actually open up the black box of workplaces, look inside that black box and say, OK, what is actually happening?

What are you actually doing? Oh, it's overhead spirals. It's overloading to-do lists. Let's change how work is assigned. Let's change how much is on your plate. That is the revolution we think we need. Now, let me just add two quick points before I wrap up this deep dive. Reducing work volumes is not the totality of slow work.

In my New Yorker piece, to keep things simple, I said, that's what I mean. Well, between me and you, we're podcast friends. So we can talk honestly. There's more to slow productivity than just that. I see the reducing of work volume as the foundation, foundational part of slow productivity.

But I also see individuals slowing down in the moment, not trying to fill every minute of their day with work, slowing out the timelines on which big projects are executed, but compensating, compensating for the slowing down with an eye for detail, for craft, for producing work at a really high level of value.

I think these should also be part of the slow productivity mindset. A small number of things at a time so you're not overloaded, at a natural pace, but steady, really high attention to craft. That I think is the sustainable model for doing work with your brain. And that is slow productivity.

So that's why we're burnt out. And that is at a very high level what I think we should do about it.