You're Making Work Harder... Here's Why

For the last 3 years, I take 45 minutes on Friday morning to draft an article for the Caveday blog.
I’ve found ways to cut the time down even further– keeping a running list of topics with notes for what to write about, for example.

But for me, important tasks don’t always feel done unless they were hard. Does that sound familiar?

Most of our lives we’ve been rewarded for hard work and good outcomes. When things go well, we get recognition. When we’ve put in a significant amount of effort, we get noticed.

So we often tie high effort to success.
Struggle means success.

So when we do work that feels easy, or comes quickly to us, it doesn’t always feel like it’s good. Or will be successful. Because hard work means struggle and struggle means success.

So we make work harder for ourselves. We take more time, get more distracted, add more steps, overcomplicate. Subconsciously, that helps us feel like we’re working harder and will be more successful.

But the work itself doesn’t have to get harder.
We don’t even really have to work on making our process faster or more efficient.

What will help in the long run is putting consistent effort in over time and making our own definition of “great.”

When I finished writing this draft and it only took 10 minutes, I thought, “something is not right.” And then stopped myself. Is this idea clear? Does it make you see something in a new way? Is it relevant? And am I proud of my work? Ok then it’s great. Let’s ship it.

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Caveday is a company aimed at improving your relationship to work. We write regular posts on Medium and send out monthly newsletters with productivity tips, life hacks, and recommendations. Sign up for the mailing list here.

Jake Kahana is a cofounder of Caveday. Sign up for his personal emails, called “The Email Refrigerator” here.