Do workaholics always lose touch?
Just an idle thought to keep this site going this week: do people who exhibit so-called “workaholic” tendencies inevitably end up out of touch with the the latest goings-on?
I think they do. I don’t see a way around it.
One of the first things people sacrifice when they get overwhelmingly busy is their intellectual curiosity and inventiveness. When you’re stressed, you stop learning, and just start relying on the things you already know — the old chestnuts that have worked in the past and will, presumably, continue to work.
Further, this kind of work environment kills any kind of cultural connection. And I don’t just mean that in the “let’s go look at paintings or listen to beat poetry” sense. I’m speaking more broadly: of tech culture, of greater trends and shifts, of people and how they think and what they do.
It may not seem like much when your overworked co-worker tells you they haven’t seen a movie in years, haven’t finished that book they started five years ago or that their RSS reader has over 40,000 unread items in it, going back months, but these things don’t just happen in a vaccuum. Any employee that far removed from the world at large is, at best, going to be operating at a diminished capacity for creativity.
It’s an odd situation we find ourselves in with work culture, because while we’re finally starting to understand on a macro level that people working themselves to death isn’t a very good thing, we still tend to see honour in burning the midnight oil (or the candle at both ends, or whatever you happen to be setting afire) to get work done.
We need to get away from that. It’s not a good idea in mental or physical health terms, and it’s not a good idea in the knowledge economy, because working all the time impedes knowledge.
Take a break. Read a book. Go to the movies. Learn something. It’s important.
Photo by truthlying. Licensed under Creative Commons
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 12:40 am and is filed under At Work, Attitude, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Matt Elliott November 16th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Definitely still experimenting. Looking for that elusive happy medium.
Thanks!