Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

Full text of book is available in several formats on the web page.

In the spring of 2013, I unwittingly set off a very minor international sensation.

It all began when I was asked to write an essay for a new radical magazine called Strike! The editor asked if I had anything provocative that no one else would be likely to publish. I usually have one or two essay ideas like that stewing around, so I drafted one up and presented him with a brief piece entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”

The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it? Certainly you meet people now and then who seem to feel their jobs are pointless and unnecessary. Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse? Would this not be a terrible psychic wound running across our society? Yet if so, it was one that no one ever seemed to talk about. There were plenty of surveys over whether people were happy at work. There were none, as far as I knew, about whether or not they felt their jobs had any good reason to exist.

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The Art of Finishing via Bytedrum

“It’s a quiet Saturday afternoon. I’ve carved out a few precious hours for coding, armed with a steaming cup of coffee and the familiar urge to dive into a project. As I settle into my chair and open my terminal, I’m confronted with a challenge that’s become all too familiar: deciding which of my many unfinished projects to tackle.

I navigate to my project directory, greeted by a graveyard of half-implemented ideas and stalled works-in-progress. Each one represents a different problem I’ve tried to solve, a different technology I’ve attempted to master. They’re all interesting, each with its own purpose and potential. But as I scan through them, I can already feel my enthusiasm waning. I know that whichever one I choose, I’ll be facing not just the original problem, but a hydra of new challenges that have sprouted since I last looked at the code.”

Read this entire article – The Art of Finishing via Bytedrum 

Be A Thermostat, Not A Thermometer via Lara Hogan [Shared]

As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of those around us. It’s usually not even something we do consciously; we just see someone using a different tone of voice or shifting their body language, and something deep in our brain notices it.

If you’ve ever attended a meeting where there were some “weird vibes,” you know what I’m talking about. You couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but something about the energy of the room was off—and that feeling affected you, even if it was super subtle.

We’re wired to spidey sense this stuff; this gut instinct is part of what’s helped us stay safe for millenia. Our amygdalas are constantly on the lookout for threats in our environment that could be bad news. Plus, we tend to infer meaning from those weird vibes. Our brain is trying to make sense of the shift in behavior, so we’ll make some (often subconscious) guesses about what’s truly going on. We often even jump to the assumption that those vibes are about us.

Read this entire article – Be A Thermostat, Not A Thermometer via Lara Hogan

Building a Creativity Kanban via Will Patrick [Shared]

To get more creative work done, think like a car manufacturer. A system for optimising the creative process and breaking through your barriers.

Always Be Shipping

Have you made anything lately?

Have you published anything? Shipped anything? Finished something and put it into the world? Your answer will lie somewhere on the spectrum between ‘Yes – today!’ and, ‘No. Never.’

Your answer is important.

Tell me how often you ship, publish, or show the world what you’re doing and I’ll tell you where you’ll be in five years. In short: you’ll be doing incredibly well and far, far better than the person who said, ‘No. Never.’

If you are someone who is in the business of creating anything – whether it’s code, books, photographs, videos, lessons, physical products – the importance of regularly shipping what you make cannot be emphasised enough.

It is vital.

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Employees Are Sick of Being Asked to Make Moral Compromises via Harvard Business Review 

Summary.   

Moral injury is experienced as a trauma response to witnessing or participating in workplace behaviors that contradict one’s moral beliefs in high-stakes situations and that have the potential of harming others physically, psychologically, socially, or economically, and it could prompt people to leave a company. It was first studied in veterans who’d witnessed atrocities of war. More recently, this research has been extended to health care, education, social work, and other high-pressure and often under-resourced occupations. The past two years have made it increasingly clear that moral injury can occur in many contexts and populations, including the workplace. As a new world of work unfolds before us and the pact between employee and employer gets rewritten, leaders have to learn and evolve to keep pace. The authors present six things leaders can do to ensure their actions aren’t unintentionally injuring the moral center of those they lead.

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