Writing Boots readers know I hate to offer anything useful here, because you’re not supposed to get something for nothing. But every once in awhile I cave in to my sympathetic nature.
Toward the end of a meeting of professional communicators recently I asked how everyone was doing, at work.
“I feel a high level of existential stress,” said one, noting that she has meetings from 7:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. all day, and “work starts at 5:00 p.m.”
“I feel always at risk of burnout,” said another, and rout was on.
“I’m too busy, and I farm out all the fun stuff. I don’t have the bandwidth to do the interesting stuff.”
“There’s no room for error in this work.”
“I could not take a day off without having to pay for it all weekend long.”
“We make it look so easy and we do it quickly and well—and then people think it’s easy work.”
“How do you manage the fatigue, malaise—and, not to use a bougie word, ennui?”
Someone bashfully, one of the participants asked if we’d thought about something called, “Start, Stop, Continue.”
Maybe one or two had—but the rest of us said, “Go on!”
It’s this simple, she explained:
With your boss, you set aside a moment to write down:
• Here’s what we want to do. (To better serve our organization and its mission.)
• Here’s what we do. (Usually a combination of strategically vital work and “legacy” programs” as they’re politely called in corporate circles.)
• What can we stop doing? (Again, to better serve our organization and its mission—maybe more sustainably, while we’re at it.)
Seems to me like a conversation that ought to take place annually if not quarterly in most corporate working groups.
And if you find that notion insultingly basic on one hand, or embarrassingly unrealistic on the other? Well, then I haven’t broken my rule against being useful after all.