Pseudo work (PW) is a problem. Pseudo work consists of tasks that feel productive but neither contribute to your goals nor help anyone else to any meaningful degree. PW (pseudo work) is neither fun nor useful but, because it feels like work, we allow ourselves to do it and consider it work time. That means we may not even have it on our radar as something to get rid of (unlike pure procrastination time, which we know we want to reduce). Yet if we remove PW, we can free up time for either real work or fun, either of which would be a better choice. Plenty of others have written about this topic, by various names, but I think it’s important to reiterate. I continue to try to cut PW out of my own life.
Note: there is, of course, such a thing as taking a mental break. If you find PW useful as a mental break and recovery between bouts of meaningful work, I’m all for it. Just keep in mind that you are taking a break from the real stuff. Furthermore, note that work comes on a continuum from pseudo work to real work. Here, I’m mainly talking about tasks that have very little or no value. Many of these points apply (but certainly to a lesser extent) to work that’s a bit more useful but still not significantly so.
A related problem occurs with what I’ll call PFPW (pseudo fun pseudo work). PFPW is fun and useful for work goals but not well optimized for either one. Usually, we’re better off dividing our time into real work time, where we try to accomplish our work goals efficiently, and fun time where we genuinely relax or aim to enjoy ourselves. Of course, some jobs incentivized PFPW, for instance, by making you stay at the office when you don’t have much real work to do. Since you can’t have real fun there and don’t have work to do, you do PFPW instead. Unfortunately, this is frequent in some industries and is an effective way to make employees unhappy.
PW is a real problem for individuals, but for startups and small companies, it can be deadly. What makes startup pseudo work (SPW) so bad is that startups are almost always on the verge of death and must drive relentlessly towards their goals to live. SPW, therefore, can be a fatal distraction. Imagine a person standing on a bridge on fire, but who happens to notice he is thirsty. He leisurely drinks from his water bottle to quench his thirst until the bridge collapses into the river. Yes, he was thirsty, but he wasn’t THAT thirsty. There are endless things to do at a startup that feel like work, but that don’t move you strongly in the direction of survival. Don’t quench thirst; run to the other side of the burning bridge.
What pseudo work do you do regularly that you should reduce?
Here is a list of common forms of “pseudo work” and “pseudo fun pseudo work” that I’ve seen (or done):
- giving long responses to work emails when much shorter responses would suffice
- conducting unnecessarily long meetings or meetings with lots of unnecessary chit chat
- agreeing to meet with people (or initiating meetings with people) just because they work in one’s industry, even though it’s doubtful that either party will benefit from the meeting.
- reading the news or reading trade publications (except when one is in the relatively rare sort of work where reading the news is actually important to one’s job). If you like reading the news for some non-work-related reason, then there’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily “work” that counts.
- agreeing to give talks in cases when we have mainly non-work-related motivations (e.g., we like the idea of it), but we pretend it’s because it actually moves our work goals forward. It may be worth giving a talk for those non-work motivations, but it’s useful to know why we’re actually doing it and not count it as work if it isn’t.
- double or triple checking things when minor errors wouldn’t matter
- excessive time spent chatting with teams on slack or sending emails to check in on things when not really necessary
Here is a list of common forms of pseudo work I’ve seen founders at startups fall into especially (and in some significant cases have fallen into myself):
- doing work yourself that could easily be delegated to someone you manage when you have more mission-critical work you should be focused on
- doing work that is not related to the core of your business that could easily and cheaply be outsourced to a 3rd party vendor
- networking with other startup founders too much (e.g., going to lots of startup events without a clear important goal)
- spending too much time and energy worrying about record-keeping over-focus on critical operations
- spending too much time on high-level discussions of the business, market, or future when the product you’re building is not actually good yet
- obsessively checking performance metrics way more often than is useful
- focusing too much credibility or brand when the product is not yet released
- delaying too long on releasing the product or pushing out new features due to perfectionistic optimization
- spending too much time in meetings and not enough time building and problem-solving
- spending too much time on paperwork or formal processes that are not actually improving your business
- spending too much time planning when in the same amount of time one could have already executed a reasonable solution
- micromanaging employees rather than letting them figure out their own solutions
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