Escaping Workaholism

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansen, cofounders of thirty seven Signals. This week, we have a question all about workaholism. This is a chapter in their book, Rework. And Nestor wrote in with a listener question. He said, hey, guys. First of all, thank you for your inspiring book. It really hit home for me. It helped me reconnect with my purpose, let go of some of the pressure I put on myself, and most importantly, it gave me hope. Hope that work can actually be enjoyable, that you can have fun and feel alive doing what you do. In my environment, there's always been this belief that work has to be hard, painful, almost like a sacrifice, and that never sat well with me. So reading your perspective was super refreshing. One thing that really struck a chord with me was the chapter about being a workaholic. That hit deep. It's something I grew up with. My dad was one, my boss, two, and I've definitely picked it up myself. It made me deeply unhappy over the years. Honestly, I don't want to work as much as I do. It's affected my relationship, my mental health, and yet I've carried on because it was the, quote, right way to succeed. Your book gave me permission to rethink that, and now I'm even considering sharing this idea with the rest of the company. Because I truly believe there's value in focusing on being productive, not just on doing a lot. Then he said, that said, there were a few fears that came up for me while reading, and I'd love to know your thoughts. Maybe you've already solved these things in your own team. So Nestor has a couple of questions. I'm gonna start with the first one, which is how can we measure productivity without setting goals? We're not big fans of setting targets in our company, not even for the sales team. We trust people to do their job and give their best, But still, I wonder how do we track whether someone is actually being productive without falling into the trap of micromanaging or adding pressure? I think this is a great question for you guys because we don't do a lot of these kind of tracking things either. But how do you guys handle that, knowing someone's being productive? I'll just say that, first of all, I hate the idea of measuring productivity, like, as a thing. I hate it. I hate the concept. I think you just have to pay attention to what's going on and what people are doing. And when you're involved with the work, you know who's doing the work, you know what they're doing, and you know what's going on. I think everything else is an abstraction and a representation of something that you could actually know if …