How to Overwhelm Better
4 Ways to Deal With a Job That Asks Too Much
Issue 1, Volume 24
When you feel ineffective on the job, when you feel utterly exhausted, when you find yourself treating others like doorstops—how do you deal? Those are questions I’ve been asking early-career professionals over the past year. That research, along with a lot of reading, has turned up four basic approaches to professional overwhelm:
Restructure (through remote work)
Reorient (through the network)
Recalibrate (through deep work)
Recenter (through less work)
The first two are big-picture ideas; the second two are small-picture ones. To explain each of them, I’ll draw on stories from my friend Corey Kohn. As a leader of a Boulder-based software design agency called Dojo4, she works with a team based on her what she’s learned about the overwhelm of work as a rising professional
image of Corey Kohn from Dojo4’s website (https://www.dojo4.com/about)
Restructuring
This first approach is going to strike you, maybe, as out-of-reach. But hang with me. It is, I’ll admit, the sort of approach most easily taken by organizational leaders, because it entails overhauling organizational culture. But even if you’re not in management, I think you have some moves to make. Or so suggest Charlie Wurzel and Anne Helen Peterson in their new book Out of Office, which you ought do you yourself a solid and read.
Anyway, here’s how Corey restructured one organization. Back when she was an early-career professional, she was invited to join a software development agency that would become the company she leads today, Dojo4. It was a leap of faith from being a film editor and creative to being—whut?—an entrepreneur and company leader. She still shakes her head, amazed at that mode switch. But she proved to be good at the work, and her company did very well. So well, in fact, that something felt off. Although the profit margin kept expanding, she found that, somehow, the values margin was shrinking. The work felt increasingly sad and pointless. “We had this crisis of conscience, if that’s what you want to call it,” she told me. “And we decided to fire everyone and start a new business.”
The company-wide firing was, Corey admits, sheer theatre. They let everybody go and then immediately turned around and invited everybody back to a restructured, values-forward organization, which their website now describes as “a community-based, member-owned agency that creates positive change through technology and design” whose “best work occurs at the intersection of custom technology and environmental/social change.”
The theatrics paid off with good vibes: “right away, there was this influx of energy, good feelings. We got way more interesting clients…” The woman-led company took a lot of structural risks—becoming a member-owned co-op, for one thing—but those risky moves built working community to endure the pandemic.
As a young professional, you might not have Corey’s power to directly change your organization. But hold on. You do have one thing in your favor: in this time of endemic, every company is reevaluating how they do business in and out of the office. Negotiating with your boss about how to handle remote and hybrid work can be one meaningful way to achieve meaningful change. You may just catch your higher-up at a moment of unexpected openness—especially if you pursue this change with others eager to restructure your workplace.
Reorienting
This second approach notices not just to your overwhelming tasklist, but also your overwhelming connections. Look, you’re more connected than you usually notice. And it’s this mutuality that led me in my book Why Spiritual Capital Matters to ask what unobvious connections might help you deal with vocational overwhelm. Perhaps you’re not as alone as you feel some days.
I think Corey would agree. At first, she tried to frame Dojo4’s social enterprise with a high-minded commitment to working exclusively with pro-social organizations. But she soon figured out that just because another organization promotes a social mission doesn’t mean it’s an effective mission or even a responsible one. Besides, she explained to me, no company should be perfectionistic. When Dojo4 opened partnerships with companies unconcerned with the social good, the agency expanded their capability to network for good. Now Corey and her colleagues could persuade other for-profit companies to care about people and the planet.
The agency found another way to reorient as well: to make a community-minded place to work. So, for example, they welcomed outsiders to use their workspace as hot desks and hosted luncheons for locals: “Sometimes there's four of us and other times like today, we had 20 people…. We order a big lunch and then we offer that to our community. There's dogs and kids and it's so sweet. It feels plentiful.” By thinking in a networky way, Corey has reoriented workplace community towards what my friend Mark Sampson would call creating opportunities for neighboring.
Dogs and kids and lots of lunch—that might sound, in an introverted moment less like a cure for than a cause of overwhelm. But it’s overwhelm in a good way, like a huge wave in the sunlight that takes you off your feet and reminds you that you’re quite happily not in charge of the world.
Recalibrating
This third approach builds a big fence between the time you need for slow, creative, problem-solving and the rest of your crazy day and crazier inbox. This is the approach Cal Newport recommends in his book Deep Work.
Even as a leader of a software design agency immersed in the rapid-fire, hyperactive world of digital technology, Corey knows the importance of pulling back from the distractions of media for the sake of deep work. As a Buddhist conversant in contemplative practice, she knows that digital design requires spiritual practice for practicing creativity. You have to think deeply and patiently in order to think creatively. In fact, that deep work is essential, Corey would say, not only for thinking creatively, but also for avoiding the excesses of consumer capitalism. It is all too easy to develop a wickedly innovative app that the universe simply doesn’t need.
I should say that Corey describes herself as a Jew-Bu, a blend of spiritual traditions that not only equips her for deep work, but occasionally makes her suspicious of limits to spirituality discourse. “I think that having a spiritual awakening,” she told me once, “or having a sense of a personal spiritual practice or anything like that can have a lot of good feelings involved, but often times what it awakens to is the inherent difficulty of life.” Corey’s fully capable of deep work, but she knows that we cannot simply deep-work our way to peace and tranquility. Which brings us to the next mode of engaging vocational overwhelm:
Recentering
This approach advises you to reposition your job as just one part of your life, rather than the whole of who you are, an insight integral to Jonathan Malesic’s book The End of Burnout.
But I also learned this mode from Corey who, in the late summer and fall of 2019, collaborated with me to launch a podcast called Spiritual Capital. It proved to be a challenging but joyous collaboration. Challenging, because I was in Chicago and she in Boulder. Joyous, because Corey collaborated with a generosity that she brings to all her work. She was happy to greet my students (as they, in turn, helped us with tech questions), and she was quick to introduce me to her coworkers and family as well. I remember seeing her small daughter clamber up on her lap, a gorgeous little being who had just swum up to peer into the screen, keen, colorful, avid of life.
Launching this podcast was itself an act of rebellion against the law of ROI, which says that for every action there must be a monetary return. Corey clearly seeks much more from life than compensation for total work. Running a company can absorb every iota of attention she has. Instead, she keeps her center outside her work, even when—or especially when—that means doing less work.
So, there you go: four modes of engaging overwhelm. Two of them—restructuring and reorienting—are organizational. Two of them—recalibrating and recentering—are personal. Corey’s done them all. Which sounds like it might work for you?
If you’re an early-career professional, you may be wondering, how do I try these modes out when I hold zero power in my organization? That’s an extravagantly practical question and one I’ll address in next week’s newsletter. See you then!
What I’m Learning from
Here’s where I share books, pods, and shows that are my teachers throughout the week. But it’s time for a mode switch! Let’s talk not about who I’ve been learning from but what. Here’s a 2-minute account of the personally formative practice of longhanding my life.
Great to spend some Saturday morning time with you with this ‘Stack. Do you know 2 other early-career professionals who’d benefit from this research-based content? Ask them if they’d mind if you put their emails in the subscription box below. And thanks! - Craig