The dangers of getting too intense about work

 
It’s easy to get too intense about your work. Most people, deep down, believe what they do is valuable and important. They care about it. The employees most likely to feel work-based anxiety — even, eventually, burnout — are the ones who put more of themselves into their job, spend more time at work, and take work more personally. You may believe that it’s a major step from there to treating your job with such intensity it starts to take over nearly all of your life, but you’d be wrong.

Intensity creeps up on you. What begins as little more than being somewhat over-concerned about doing things right, gradually builds into spending more and more time thinking and planning your workplace actions. What starts as a willingness to put in a few extra hours to get an important job done, slips into working extra time regularly, then into piling on the hours to maintain additional output on a regular basis — even taking a macho pride in working longer hours than others.

Oddly enough, over-work is often addictive. It raises your levels of adrenaline and feelings of excitement and importance. The increased output typically makes your boss take notice. You gain a reputation for being keen, a person �€œon the up,�€� a more valuable team member, a tough guy. You don’t want to lose those attributes.

Unfortunately, working long hours is similar to getting a pay raise. What starts by being important and special, soon becomes routine. People no longer notice — unless you manage to �€œup the ante�€� by being even more productive and working even more hours.

Are you working harder and harder, yet feel like you’re still not getting enough done?

If this is the case, the problem may lie in your attitude, not in your ability to organize your schedule. Piling on the intensity is the typical response of a person who imagines he or she is “;tough” (a potential workaholic) to increased job demands. It’s also likely to be a major part of the cause of the increase. Overwork and frenetic intensity are great ways to lower productivity and increase mistakes and reworking.

The employee who is approaching burnout is likely to be the last to see it. Until then, he or she will probably try methods of coping that make the problem worse — like increasing yet again the hours spent at work; becoming even more personally anxious and involved in work problems; and trying to drive away the blues by overt toughness and single-minded effort. You may be able to outperform your colleagues, but you can’t outperform your own limits.

Don’t just shrug this off as scare mongering or think you’re immune. It’s a serious issue that can wreck lives — and produce problems for other people as well. The harder you work, the more the pressure grows on others to keep up with you. They’ll soon begin to resent you, seeing what you do as evidence of showing off, not as a sign that you’re getting so caught up in the attempt to outdo yourself — not them — that you’ve lost all sense of proportion.

Getting help

The good news is that the slide into workaholism is entirely reversible. And your teammates and coworkers are more likely to be part of the solution that the cause of the problem.

In most cases, they’ll already know there’s something wrong. They’ll have sensed the difference in your behavior and seen the change in your mood. If they’re keeping their distance, you’ve probably been growling every time they came near you. If you let them, they can help you get your life back into proportion. Work doesn’t have to be based on tough guys facing each other in an atmosphere of cut-throat competitiveness. Seeing your colleagues as rivals in a race to grab the glory is more likely to be the result of having lost a sense of proportion than the truth.

Any good manager should already have started to investigate to find out what’s wrong. It’s their job. But not every manager is good. Some see the problem and apply James Thurber’s classic remedy of “don’t think about it and it will go away.” Others happily accept the extra output and decide that they needn’t be concerned about what it’s doing to you. Only the good ones understand that driving yourself into a workaholic trance isn’t good for anyone, including them and the rest of the team. Sure they want people who work hard, but that isn’t the same as driving yourself to the point where the quality of your work suffers and breakdown is only a small step away.

Quantity of output is all that productivity measures, but quality is what the customer pays for. No one will accept shoddy work with the excuse that you’re turning out more of it every day.

Putting yourself right

In the end, it’s up to you. Your health and well-being is more your concern than anyone else’s. Change has to come from within. Here’s how to make a start:

• Slow down. The more you rush, the less clearly you can see what is happening.
• Take time out to think and reflect on your needs. Get your life into perspective. Work is important, but it’s not the only part of your life that needs time and attention.
• Break activities and problems down into smaller pieces. Start with the most obvious bit and ignore all the rest. Then take the next piece. Slow and steady lets you be productive without compromising quality.
• Never try to work your way out of the problem solely by making more effort. Use your head as well as your muscles and energy. Poorly directed effort — however much of it you apply — won’t solve anything. Usually, it will make any situation worse.
• Learn where your limits lie and stay on the right side of them. Pay attention to what works and doesn’t work for you.
• Forget the macho nonsense that you can take whatever the world throws at you. You can’t and nor can anyone else. If they say they can, they’re liars or fools — often both.

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