Working Hard on Everything Except What Matters
When people avoid work it’s often easy to spot. But what about using one type of work to avoid doing another type? That can get a lot less obvious and more complicated to address.
Why Would Anyone Do This?
Sometimes making progress means we have to do things we don’t like.
If I dread talking on the phone, and getting new customers means more phone calls, I have an incentive to do every type of work other than what will generate new customers.
I could reorganize the office, work on my logo, do some research, and go to bed tired with a long list of things I’d accomplished. None of them brought me closer to getting new customers, but I could supply ten reasons why my work was useful and necessary. Then I’d wonder why business is so slow when I’m working this hard. On some level, though, I’m rewarded because I don’t have to talk on the phone.
This sort of “avoidance work” lets people stay in their comfort zone, while appearing to work at some goal, without making effective progress toward that goal.
Common examples of this behavior include:
- Stuck in the planning, research, and review stage. This one is particularly insidious because these things are very legitimate and useful activities, so it’s easy to hide behind them while looking responsible but avoiding progress.
- Getting sidetracked by graphic design or trivial details. If “We can’t start because the logo isn’t right” means a month-long delay finding a graphic designer, that’s a problem.
- Using fear, perfectionism, or both to keep things stuck. Progress is slowed in the name of being cautious, or for getting things “just right.”
- Constantly generating ideas but not picking something to start. Allows people to say, “Hey I’m working hard being creative” without having to knuckle down and make the idea happen, or risk failing.
- Picking things then regularly abandoning them before they are completed. By picking something there is the appearance of progress, but then there’s always some reason why it wasn’t finished. Might be “bad workers,” bad weather, the economy these days, grandma’s funeral. Something always gets in the way. Eventually, though, because of luck or enough pressure to deliver something tangible, a project might get completed. How can it be sabotaged then? By not giving it the support it needs, or abandoning it at the first real obstacle.
These behaviors are particularly damaging to your business because they combine apparent reasonableness, real work, and unconscious motivations. People doing these things aren’t obviously lazing around. Nor are they doing clearly useless busywork. Nor are they necessarily self-aware that they’re avoiding something.
They are working and have plausible justifications for their actions. They may believe themselves to be really truly making progress, working hard and smart, toward the larger stated goal. And some real progress might get made from time to time!
The Value of Awareness
So the question becomes, what can we do about this kind of behavior pattern?
For people who do this and know they do it, and don’t want to change, nothing I say will matter anyway.
If you recognize yourself in some of these behaviors now, and this comes as a surprise to you, then there’s hope to change.
If your employee acts this way, recognizing it gives you an opportunity to intervene.
If your boss or business client does this, it’s good to understand the behaviors, but there’s not a lot you can do to change such a person.
Simply being aware of avoidance work is valuable. Once you see it and recognize what’s going on, a lot of mysteries disappear. If one or more people engage in avoidance work but it’s up to them for the project to progress, there might be a lot of apparent activity, but not a lot of results where it matters.
There’s no need to reexamine the data or look for a missing piece to explain why things are stuck. You’ve found it.