Work Addiction Wears a Hard-Work Costume

Nobody worries about you when your bad habit makes you look productive.

You become the person who can handle it, and somewhere along the way, being unable to stop starts looking an awful lot like being good at your job.

Which brings me to an inconvenient confession:

I love working.

That used to feel like a flex. Lately it feels like something I should say more carefully, the way you’d mention a peanut allergy at a dinner party.

Because I really do love it.

I love taking an idea and figuring out how to make it real. Most of all, I love opening a blank document with absolutely no idea what I’m doing and eventually looking up to find a Thing where there previously wasn’t one.

Give me a problem I think I can solve and internet access and I can entertain myself for an unreasonable amount of time….

This has been very useful professionally, I might add.

It also makes me exactly the kind of person who probably needs to know what work addiction looks like.

hi, im Mona, and im a workaholic…
(now say hi mona back, cmon now)

Apparently, the Hours Aren’t the Problem

I started reading about workaholism expecting the obvious.
Long hours. Too much work. Burnout. Someone answering Slack from the toilet.

Instead, I got stuck on detachment.

Psychologists distinguish between people who work hard and people who feel compelled to keep working, and those groups don’t divide neatly by hours. Someone can work sixty hours in a week and still leave work at work. Another person can work forty-five and bring all forty-five home with them.

The laptop closes. Their brain does not.

Annoying metric.

Hours are easy. I can look at a clock and know I’ve been working too long.
It’s much harder to count the meeting I’m replaying while making dinner,
the email I suddenly remember from bed, or the little itch that appears when
I’m sitting around doing nothing and know there are technically things I could be doing.

And “could be doing” is dangerous territory when your brain can always think of something.

The APA recently covered this distinction, along with something else I found interesting: researchers don’t even have one clean number for how common work addiction is. Different definitions and measurements produce different answers. (APA feature on work addiction)

Fine.

The research did leave me with a much more useful question anyway:

What happens to you when the work stops?

Well, sh*t.

I Know When My Work Gets Bad

My first warning sign is irritation. 

I know what good work feels like in my body. I’m making one connection and it gives me three more. I’m bouncing between tabs because the tabs actually belong together. Something that didn’t exist this morning is suddenly sitting in front of me and I want to keep poking at it just to see what else it can become.

I f*cking love that feeling.

Then eventually… I’m rereading the same sentence four times.
Moving something two pixels to the left. Putting it back.
Opening another tab for reasons that have been lost to history.

A fifteen-minute problem becomes a forty-five-minute problem
because I have decided it and I are going to settle this tonight.

That’s usually when the ideas have stopped feeling good, ya know? 

Historically, my response to this information has been ~ extremely ~  sophisticated:
get some coffee.
Change the music.
ooo maybe I need a snack.
Perhaps I need a different project….
Perhaps the real issue here is that I don’t currently have enough things open.

Anything except, oh, I dunno, you know, stopping.

But I’ve started noticing that once I hit that point,
more time doesn’t necessarily give me more good work, like at all. 

I can keep producing things. I just start paying a premium for them in time,
patience and tomorrow’s energy.

This Is Terrible Timing, Obviously

This realization has arrived while I have more things I want to make than hours I’d reasonably like to spend making them.

Services are launching. Automations are running. I’m publishing regularly, working on a podcast, writing a newsletter, selling products and rebuilding pieces of my business while getting ideas for completely different pieces of my business.

This is my natural habitat. I’m having a f*cking blast over here, mayne.

Nobody has to force me to work.That’s kind of the issue here.
When you actually like what you’re doing, staying too long can look suspiciously like enthusiasm.

I have another idea. I’m almost finished. This will only take ten minutes. While I’m already here…

Four of the most expensive words in the English language.

Suddenly the thing I opened the laptop to do is finished, but I’m still here doing something I invented forty minutes ago.

I’ve also spent a ridiculous amount of time lately building automations specifically to remove repetitive work from my plate. And this is where I caught myself doing something genuinely stupid.

I’d automate a process, realize I’d just saved myself a few hours,
and immediately start deciding what I could put in those hours.

I made the space.
Then apparently decided the space looked unemployed.

A Terrible Return on Automation

I didn’t really think about this part when I became obsessed with automating things. Saving time and actually keeping the time are two separate skills.

If something used to take me four hours and now takes forty minutes, there are three hours and twenty minutes sitting there that didn’t exist before.

My brain sees that and goes:

oooooo, what can we do with that?

Which, to be clear, is sometimes great.
That extra time might become another article. A new product.
Something I’ve wanted to test for months.
An afternoon spent making something completely unnecessary because I think it’ll be cool.

I like being productive. I’m not trying to cure myself of having interests here, I just don’t think every efficiency needs to be rewarded with more work.

Because that’s a hilarious deal when you actually write it down.

Get better at your job.
Build faster systems.
Automate repetitive work.
Become dramatically more efficient.

Your prize is…

more work.

Oh.

One person can already publish, design, automate, analyze,
sell, schedule, edit and distribute an absurd amount from one laptop.
I know because I keep trying to see how far I can take it…

At some point, though,
efficiency has to pay out in something other than increased capacity.

I would like some of my winnings in time, please.

So I Needed a Stopping Rule

A stopping rule sounds much more official than it is.
Basically, you decide what tells you you’re done before you’re tired and sitting there negotiating with yourself about whether you can squeeze in one more thing.

Some people can probably use a clock for this.
6pm. Laptop closed. Goodbye. I respect your discipline and fear you slightly.

Couldn’t be me.

Some days I’m still making good things late at night. Other days my brain clocks out at 3:17pm without submitting the appropriate paperwork. So a time doesn’t really tell me much.

The quality does.

Mine is:

When the ideas stop feeling good, I’ve hit my limit.

I don’t have to be exhausted. I don’t have to reach the point where I’m staring at my screen like it has personally betrayed me.

 I can feel myself start forcing things that were flowing before.

That’s the cue.

Write down where I left off.
Leave myself enough notes that Tomorrow Mona doesn’t
open the project and immediately curse Yesterday Mona.

Life hack: Make the next step obvious.

Then go do literally anything else.

This is surprisingly difficult when I can see exactly how something should end and I’m almost there.

Almost there has stolen many an evening.

Yours Might Look Completely Different

Maybe your stopping rule is a time.

Maybe you catch yourself rereading things.
Maybe you start making dumb mistakes. Maybe every email suddenly feels like it was written specifically to piss you off.

Maybe you start a sentence, forget where it was going halfway through,
and decide the sentence is actually the problem. (hi, I’m also you) 

Whatever yours is, that’s the useful part of this exercise.
Find the thing that happens before you’re completely fried.

Because once I’m already tired, I can make a compelling case for basically anything.

I’ve already spent this long on it.
I might as well finish. Tomorrow is busy.
It’ll feel good to have it done.

Look at her. Attorney at law.

Meanwhile…
tomorrow’s version of me would probably
prefer I close the laptop and stop creating problems for her.

There’s always more work I can do.
I’m trying to get better at noticing how much of it is worth doing right now.

I Want Some of the Time Back

I am proud of how much I can do.

I can teach myself somethingbecause I got curious at lunch
and have a functional version of it by dinner.
I can keep pulling at a problem until I understand it.
I can take weird little ideas seriously enough to find out whether they work.

I don’t want to lose any of that.

I would, however, like to stop treating every hour I manage to save as vacant commercial property.

The whole reason I’m building better systems is because
I don’t want everything to require my hands on it all the time.

The website will survive the night.
Products can stay for sale. Automations can do their little robot chores.
Tomorrow can hold a task. hehehe, I checked.

Coffee is load-bearing in my house.

Turns out sleep is structural too…

So if I build something that gives me three hours back, maybe I use two of them. Maybe I use one. Maybe I take all three and become completely unavailable to my own ambitions for an afternoon.

Scandalous., right? 

I’m still figuring that part out.

For now, I have one rule:

When the ideas stop feeling good, I’ve hit my limit.

I’m getting pretty good at recognizing the moment.
Now I have to get good at listening to it.
What’s yours?

Infinite cheers and (actual) wellness,
Mona