Exhaustion is a tricky animal. When you lift the weight, your response system tells you how much you can handle. Try to lift a bucket of water and you will make it. Try to lift your car and you will not be able to. Simple, straight forward. Now try to put together a 5-slide presentation about your business plan and you will (hopefully) make it. How about 100 slides? You probably will still make it, but I bet that after 20, the quality will gradually decrease up to a point where your work becomes worthless. For intellectual work, there is no quick response system. There is no muscle that tells you when to stop, therefore you have to study, understand, and direct yourself.
My stories on this
Actually, I could have a lot of stories to share, but I will focus on a few. Early in my career, when I was head of the controlling department, I was asked to shorten the usual 3-week business plan cycle to a week, and prepare a presentation about the results. It required a lot of extra effort, but it was done, presentation delivered. Unfortunately, there was a mistake in the files that we didn’t check due to time pressure. The result of the financial year was +10 million€ when we presented it and -5 million€ after the error was corrected. That almost cost my job. Learning point: if you increase your speed too much, you will potentially crash.
A few years ago, I was asked to prepare a presentation about our performance in the financial year and the results of certain changes in market dynamics. The meeting with top management was supposed to be in 2 week’s time. I’ve put together about 10 slides that were fairly high level (presentation was to the CEO), punchy, and backed by data. I was then asked to add a few more slides on specific topics. Then a few more again, always having very limited time to produce those. A couple of days before the deadline, Saturday morning at 4 AM, after working the whole night we were seemingly ready. We had 104 slides, with a bunch of errors, unreconcilable items, unclear definitions, and obviously no time to present or make a point. In the end, we presented up to slide 13, which made almost 90% of my work completely useless. Even worse, we haven’t managed to show that we have a good understanding of our market, discuss specific events. Learning point: don’t work extra if you are not asked to, focus on quality rather than quantity, especially when it comes to dealing with top management.
Recently there was a period when, again, everything was urgent, there was a lot of time pressure and limited resources to keep up with surging requests. We had to produce many business cases one after the other, besides a lot of other activities we were dealing with on a daily basis. Many of these cases had errors, even significant ones, that we later had to go back and change, explain and waste double the time that we were supposed to. Errors were sometimes as stupid as mixing up yearly with monthly figures. Besides, we don’t have a system in place to handle all these requests, the information that was coming in, and the priorities. We ended up producing a lot of useless files and not being able to make clear suggestions to the business. We should have either not accept these requests, knowing that we will not be able to deliver, or having seen the increasing number of requests, strengthen our processes, maybe increase resources to be able to deal with them. Instead, we did more but provided less. Learning point: If possible, try to strengthen your processes before accepting more pressure, rather than accept the higher workload just to figure out you are not able to cope with it.
These are just a few examples, but there could be many more. In all the above stories I would have achieved a lot more by doing (a lot) less. Quality versus quantity. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “you can have it cheap, quick, and good, but you can choose only two of these”. I find it very true. You can either accept or experience yourself that only 2 out of 3 is possible at the same time. If you have to do a lot, inevitably quality will fall. I can hardly think of a situation when we prefer quantity to quality, especially in finance. Unfortunately, reality often proves me wrong.
3 phases of doing more
Let me try to break down the above into 3 phases. In the short term doing more usually has its benefits. You can almost always temporarily increase your output, but remember that this should be temporary and reasonable. You cannot put in 14 consecutive hours of work for two weeks, that is just inhumane. You can put in some extra work over the weekend, but not every single weekend over the next 5 years. If you put in the extra weekend, or some late hours, probably you can finish up a few more things, so your output increases. But remember, this is the short term!
In the medium term, say 3-6 months, when you keep working over the weekends, put in extra hours at night, exhaustion will kick in and quality will drastically decrease, resulting in errors, potentially even significant ones.
In the long term you will simply burn out either mentally or emotionally, or in most cases both.
It is important to realize at what stage you are. It might be that the company culture is to make people work to exhaustion (often the cases for big 4 companies), it should be in the best interest of everybody to change that. If you manage you will reach a lot more by doing less.
Rino’s story on this
I have a good old colleague/mentor/friend with whom I used to work together 10+ years ago. We haven’t been in touch for a long time but a few of his stories and his approach to work had a strong impact on me. When we’ve met, he was already a wise old man with 40+ years of work experience gained all over the world, while I was a fresh graduate in my first job ever, trying to figure myself out.
One anecdote he told me and I retold uncountable times was about a woodcutter. So let me do it again for you guys. A man sees a woodcutter, sweating, cutting wood with a hand saw. The man observes him for a while, then walks up to him and asks what he was doing. “I have to cut this log”- the woodcutter replies. “But your saw is not sharp, why don’t you sharpen it?” – the man questions. “There is no time for that, I have to keep cutting.”. That story he told me once but reminded me many times when he saw the occasion. This was the time when our company was going through a massive transformation, a lot of changes were made way too frequently, a lot of activities were going on and a lot of mess was created. He kept reminding us that sometimes you have to slow down, reflect, and understand what you are doing and why. The woodcutter thought he was doing a good job as he didn’t stop with the saw. He could have seen that the saw was not sharp, but was too busy cutting, thereby losing time and effort with his work. The objective was not to saw and saw but to saw. Once, done well, it could have been a quick and efficient job, without waste (of time and effort).
Often at work, we do the same. Push out one more e-mail at 10 PM, respond to one more useless request, do more of something, not realizing you are wasting time. Way too often we should just stop, sharpen our tools and continue in a more efficient way, thereby doing good to ourselves and others too.
The frog
If you find yourself in a situation when you continuously respond to endless e-mail chains, working late to finish up the next useless exercise, crunching a lot of numbers without knowing the reason, you will end up being the woodcutter. Or a frog. Why a frog? When a frog is placed in water that is heated continuously, it doesn’t jump out, it doesn’t escape. It adjusts its body temperature. It keeps doing so until the poor thing boils. By no means should you try this with any frog! And by no means should you do it to yourself either. As I mentioned, your brain doesn’t have a response system like your muscles do. It will keep adjusting to the reality of extreme multitasking, harmful stress, and quick but shitty work, until boils. At that point, you will not be able to concentrate on anything for more than 2 minutes, feel the pressure when there is none and the quality of your work will gradually decrease over a short period of time.
How to realize what is going on
To make things worse, the more you work the more numb your senses will be towards the quality of your work. That is, when you work beyond the level of exhaustion, you don’t feel your work to be bad. When you are still working on a file at 11 PM, you will not care about small or medium errors. You will just let it float and prioritize ending, rather than finishing it.
If you work late hours, that is already a good indicator. Your brain doesn’t function at its most efficient after 6 PM. If you constantly feel something is still to be done, you probably have too much on your table. If you don’t have free time to focus on things of your interest within your working hours (do training, learn new skills, network), you should stop and think.
The solution
Quit and move to a remote island where you can dedicate yourself to 24/7 fishing can be a solution. Buy a minivan, drive around the world working handy jobs instead of finance is another solution. Establish your own company and become a millionaire is maybe the best one.
These (well, except for the last one) are called escaping. If you find yourself in a situation of work overload throughout an extended period of time, the most important is to realize it. Then learn from the woodcutter and see if that can be a solution. Learn from the frog and jump if necessary. Or learn from my examples and simply work on fixing the problem. But do not accept the status quo if the status quo sucks. Work on the solution.
Conclusion
The corporate environment has always been a tough place. It is normal to have occasional periods of high pressure and workload, but when it becomes a constant, it becomes harmful both to the individual and the company. There is no immediate response system that tells you there is a problem, so you have to be vigilant and capable of understanding that things are not going well. Once you realized it, you are halfway done. There is no silver bullet on how to fix it and maybe it shouldn’t be fixed.