If You're Busy All Day, Your Approach to Work is Probably Wrong.
Creating an impact doesn't always make you feel accomplished, and feeling accomplished doesn't necessarily mean you're creating an impact. This is about the dopamine trap of getting things done.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I’m Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.
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One of the hardest things to learn in a career is that doing work is essentially unrelated to adding value. And as you probably know, you’re paid because your company wants to take advantage of the value you create.
Another way to think about this is that it’s entirely possible to add a ton of value, with very little work. And it’s also possible to do a ton of work, while adding very little (or no) value.
This is hard to feel intuitively, and many people never get there.
One of the great things (I’ll explain why in a bit) about being employed is that it’s easy to get caught up in doing work. You can answer emails, respond to messages, attend meetings, update project status, read some internal documentation on an important project, attend another meeting, and then your day ends.
We tend to feel good when we’re busy doing work. Completing a task, regardless of the inherent value of that task, feels good.
If you take your daily status report, and update the template to have consistent color codes, you’re likely to feel happy and content when you send it out.
That satisfaction feels good, but it’s a trick. It’s your mind encountering a hit of dopamine (not unlike eating sugar), encouraging you to partake in yet more metaphoric, nutritionless tasks.
Which sounds really poetic. I like that sentence.
What is the difference between feeling good, and creating impact?
It's relatively easy to create a feeling of satisfaction. You complete a task. You take on a few easy activities, and accomplish them confidently.
At Amazon, I found this incredibly easy. I always had a thousand things I could do at any moment. I could easily fill my days with attending meetings and responding to email. I’d never run out of tasks to complete. I could put in 9 hours a day, complete tasks that are essentially in a long list in front of me, and do it again the next day. Oh, and I would be paid for it. Great!
That pay is critical for that feeling of satisfaction. Because the company is telling me with a financial reward that my time was spent well (even if it wasn’t, because they don’t monitor this very well).
As a side note, when you’re not employed, this is trickier. I don’t generally get extrinsic rewards for my tasks, so it’s significantly harder to get that feeling of satisfaction. I feel good when I clean the chicken coop, but those chickens poop again tomorrow. It’s an interesting challenge we early retirees need to deal with.
Anyway, this feeling of satisfaction is a trick, because particularly when we’re paid for our work, we feel good doing anything, even if it didn’t create value.
And that’s not about creating impact. Impact is potential value. Impact is making a difference. You move the needle in some direction (hopefully towards your goals).
However, that feeling of satisfaction tends to be tied to doing work, and creating impact without work can feel weird and unsatisfying. I’ll get to that in a few.
But first, I thought you should hear from Jeff.
“If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that’s enough.” - Jeff Bezos
Imagine your decisions could change the direction of a company the size of Amazon. A single decision likely creates more impact than almost every other employee does over a full year. He clearly recognizes that thinking carefully and making an impact is more important than doing a lot of work.
Now, to be fair, very few of us are in a senior enough position to get away with making three decisions a day. But the general message applies to all of us. We want to create impact, not necessarily do work.
