Floundering

On working and working and not getting anywhere

Do you ever work, work, work on something and then have very little to show for it? The time you’re putting in doesn’t seem proportionate to the quality of your output? Maybe you spend an hour working on a paper or report but only manage to produce two sentences? Maybe you work on a project for hours, day after day, and then the night before the deadline, you find yourself staring down the fact that it’s only halfway done?

This working pattern is deeply frustrating. We may feel like we have no grasp on our time. We work a lot but don’t get much done—but then, sometimes, we manage to get the project over the finish line in a big rush at the last minute. Such an imbalance in our work efficiency exposes the strangeness—in fact, the humanness—of work. We are not machines; we do not work at a steady, regular pace regardless of our minds, bodies, and environments. Sometimes when we try to work, we are distracted, tired, anxious, unmotivated, or overloaded by the demands of our home lives—and we just can’t get much done.

But at the same time, we don’t have extra time to spare! We can’t keep working so inefficiently because we have dependents and home chores and all kinds of other responsibilities in our lives.

I have a lot of experience with this sort of floundering. I did it in graduate school all the time. Early in my current job, I completed two different online programs that in part trained academics in productivity and time management. I remember writing to one of the facilitators of these programs in advance to explain that my productivity problem was not putting in the time on a project. I would put in the time. I didn’t procrastinate by messing around on the internet or whatever for hours on end, thereby totally avoiding the work. My problem was actually getting things done during the time when I was working. I quickly discovered that this was a somewhat rare question that most productivity discourse did not address.

There are multiple possible reasons for floundering like this—for working but not getting anywhere—and I want to focus on two in this post. First, floundering can be an avoidance strategy, a special form of procrastination. (I used to think of it as “internal procrastination”—perhaps not the clearest term, but meaning that, yes, I’m working, but within that “working” practice, I’m procrastinating.) Rather than come up with the text for this slideshow, let me spend a lot of time fiddling with the images. Rather than write the project update email to my boss, let me carefully read through all my random emails announcing events. Or to speak more to my academic readers, rather than actually draft out the difficult intellectual ideas in my paper, let me keep reading more sources.

This avoidance kind of floundering might come from a place of not knowing how to create the required output. When we’re inexperienced at something or have doubts and ignorance about how to create the report/slideshow/talk/website/etc. and about what it should look like, we don’t know how to effectively keep moving forward and making progress. This is going to greatly hinder our work efficiency.

In that situation, the clearer you can get about what exactly, piece by piece, you are supposed to produce, the better. Do this however makes sense—by talking to a superior or an experienced colleague, by examining examples of the necessary output, or even just talking it through concretely and in detail with yourself.

The second reason for floundering that I will address here is related, in that there is a tinge of avoidance in it, as well: sometimes, especially when we are inexperienced at something, we resist the truth that it will be hard. We unrealistically expect it to be easy. When it’s not easy, we divert our attentions to the easy things we can do to appear to make progress, with a vague hope that the hard things will just fall into place.

Knowledge work is hard. Let’s accept that we’re always learning, and some aspects of our work will never be easy. I encourage digging into the hard stuff right away, approaching it as one little task after another, viewing the output-in-progress as a draft that can always be made better.

Let’s not forget the role of our bodies in floundering, too: our emotions, physical and mental states, energy, and more. I’ve written on this, but I’ll keep writing on it, as there is more to say. We will work most efficiently when we work in tune with ourselves.