The topic of today's deep dive is the 20% paradox. Now I wanted to choose a topic that was gonna be relevant to the interview that follows in this episode. So stick around for the interview that follows because you're gonna see some deep connections between what my guest has to say and this topic I wanted to tackle here up front in the show.

So what is the 20% paradox? It is the observation that if you take a knowledge worker who is burnt out or stressed about their work, which let's be honest is a large percentage of knowledge workers right now, and you measure how much work are they doing above the threshold of sustainability.

So the level where if your work is below this volume, it's pretty sustainable, you're not super stressed about it, your job is just what it is. How much work are they doing above that threshold? What you find consistently is that it's gonna be somewhere around 20% too much work.

Not 60%, not 200%, not 100%, but it's always right around 20%. Now there are people who do, let's say 100% too much work. So if we, just for the sake of round numbers, say nine to five, five days a week, if your work fits comfortably in there, that's pretty sustainable, we're used to that, we'll be okay with it.

So it's possible some people work 100 hour weeks and they need all 100 hours to get things done. I know some people like that. That's very rare, right? Most people it's about 20%. It's like me today, I'm a little stressed out today because I have probably one hour too much stuff on my schedule.

If there was one hour worth of work removed, like an appointment removed from today, from my schedule, then we would be okay. I'd have time to get everything done, I'd have some margin, the day would end at the normal time and I'd be okay. I don't have quite enough time after I record today's episode, I'm running out the door, 20% too much.

And this is what you find more or less when you study stressed out knowledge workers. So why do we fall? Why is the source of stress always this, coming from this relatively narrow quantity of overwork? Well, the wrong answer, the answer we tell ourselves when we interrogate our burnout is that I'm being asked to do the amount of work I'm being asked to do is about 20% too much.

I just look, I can't just say no to my boss, this is what's on my plate, what's on my plate is about 20% too much, it's I'm being asked to do too much. The reality is though in almost every case, you're saying no to most things that you're asked to do.

Most people don't realize this, but you're turning things down implicitly or explicitly through direct conversation or indirect action all the time. And this kind of makes sense, right? Like what are the chances that of all the different people in your life, in your professional life who could make requests of you, who can put work on your plate?

What are the chances that it just works out that all of the different requests that they throw your direction in an ad hoc manner with just Slack chats and grabbing you at a meeting or emails, what's the chances that when you add up all that work, it ends up to be exactly about 20% too many hours?

That's not gonna happen, that would be a cosmic coincidence. That's rolling 17 dice and having them all come up threes. What's really happening is that you're getting asked to do things all the time, if you really added up the work of all the things you could be doing and all the things you could be accepting it would be more hours than there are in the week, it would be impossible, you're saying no to most things and the things you say yes to ends up being about 20% too much.

The reason why I think this happens, and I've talked about this before on the show, but let's make it really clear here, is not about the logistics of work, it's not about administrative philosophies, it's not about time management strategies, it's about psychology. It is difficult for humans to say no to other humans that are making a request of them, and this would make complete sense if we wanna put on our somewhat suspect pop evolutionary psychology hat, this makes sense, right?

I wanna avoid just those stories here, but this makes sense because we're a tribal species, we're used to living in a small tribe of people who are related to us that we're fiercely loyal to. In the tribal context that dominated for the first 300,000 years of our species existence, requests were probably pretty serious, and there would be a real social consequence to saying no.

When your tribe member says, "I need you to watch my back as I attack this mammoth," if you say no, that's a problem, you're gonna get a rock to the back of the head. As you can tell, I know a lot of really good details about Paleolithic life. All right, so we take requests from people we know in our tribe seriously, so it's very difficult to say no.

Okay, this is a mismatch, of course, for a world of 700 other employees in your organization and human resources and other types of groups within your company that all need different things from you and who can make requests with basically no friction by sending you a quick email. That brain, that Paleolithic brain is a mismatch here 'cause here, it's not life and death.

Someone asking you to come participate in a panel is something that it's not a big deal if you say no to. No one's gonna get a rock to the back of their head, no one's gonna get gored by a mammoth, but our brain is concerned. So we have a hard time saying no, it's a psychological problem.

What helps if we feel overloaded and stressed? This gives you, from a internal psychological perspective, coverage to say no. Not coverage to the other person, coverage to yourself, your brain, your Paleolithic brain. We can't say no, we can't say no. You're like, I am so stressed. Like, all right, I mean, we gotta say no.

We're overloaded. I mean, look, this is an extreme circumstance. I normally would say yes, but there's these other factors like our cortisol's up, our schedule's packed. Like with reluctance, we have to say no. I really do think, this is a big source of the 20% rule, is that we engineer, we implicitly engineer the volume of our acceptances to get us a workload that's just heavy enough that we're in a persistent state of low-grade stress, and then that is where we then feel comfortable saying no to what follows.

The reason why we don't curve our workload 20% less below the sustainability threshold is because when our work is sustainable, we don't have the psychological cover to say no. It's a self-reinforcing feedback network that has a convergent steady state at the stressful side of that threshold. So I think this is really important.

The other person doesn't care as much as you think when you're politely saying no, because you've already said no to them probably seven times for other things, you just didn't realize it. They don't care, they don't know the difference. Your CV, your resume, your bosses, you think they really would know the difference between if you spent 20% less time.

That's not gonna show up. There's so much noise in how many things get accomplished or this thing took this much more time than this thing. It's all a little bit apples to oranges. 20% less work doesn't necessarily even show up in a way that anyone is ever gonna notice.

The outside world can't see things at that granularity, but it can make all the difference to your personal sustainability, your personal satisfaction. It's a small epsilon that if you close it, lots of good things happen, but it's psychologically difficult to do. So partially this is just expository. It's a theory.

We're all stressed, but not like completely 100-hour-a-week overloaded because it's a coping mechanism. Partly this is also advisory. If we understand the 20% paradox, maybe we will be a little bit more emboldened to just shave that extra epsilon of work off and fall back to a more sustainable place.

When we understand that we actually say no implicitly all the time, right? We do not have 60 hours of work exactly being put on our plate. We have 200 hours being put on our plate and we say no to most of it. Then saying no a couple more times is not so fraught, but it's gonna make all the difference in the world.

It's gonna be one less meeting today, ending your day and moving to a shutdown ritual one hour earlier than normal, starting your day one hour later, one more project off your plate, one more year in between book projects. I don't know, whatever adds up to 20% in your particular professional world, it can make all the difference.

So anyways, keep the 20% paradox in mind. It's a big driver of stress. It's largely psychological. Psychological problems have internal solutions. So we have some hope here that we can make a difference. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)