Is Your Job Hard or Just Tedious?

What does working hard even mean?

"Lions don't hunt mice. They hunt antelope." — Newt Gingrich

According to a Gallup study, 85% of employees worldwide are disengaged at work. People feel drained, exhausted, and resent their jobs. Is this because their work is genuinely hard, or are they just over saddled with mind-numbingly tedious assignments? The natural tendency is to equate working hard with long hours or having to complete many tasks, but is this actually the case?

Being in the trenches used to imply getting shot at, now it means rattling off emails and adjusting PowerPoint slides from a climate controlled office. Just because you feel drained by the end of your work day, does not mean you actually worked hard or created any value (for the shareholders or yourself). While employers often judge hard work by how occupied, stressed or burnt out their little worker bees are, you should avoid falling into this trap.

If your goal is to be effective, and one day rise to the top of your craft, one of the most important things you can do is discern what activities will make you most indispensable to your employer, clients and other stakeholders. This will help you earn a comfortable living but if you want satisfaction, you need to figure out which activities give you energy and spend less time on tasks that are a drain.

This article will help you figure out if your job is pushing you to your max potential or just making you waste away. What you can do to make sure you are pursuing difficult but meaningful labor you can look back and be proud of.

If this week’s article does not interest you, please check out some other recent ones:

How Society Uses Bureaucracy to Keep You Safe but Miserable

Should I go into Debt for a Rolex?

Exercise advice from former fitness coach

The world needs another Ben Franklin

Bad Work is Shallow

How often do you face a problem at work that takes longer than 15 seconds to solve? If this doesn’t happen daily—or at least weekly—your job isn’t mentally stimulating enough. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s boring or easy, but if you can go eight hours without pushing your brain near its limits, there’s a mismatch between your abilities and your responsibilities.

Think of talent like a swimming pool: if you spend all your time in the shallow end, you’re not getting the full workout. And the longer you stay there, the harder it becomes to swim in the deep end. If your job keeps you in the shallow end, it will eventually feel predictable and mundane. Some people actively seek that out. But the uncomfortable truth is that most workers don’t lack motivation because their job is too hard, they lack motivation because they aren’t challenged. They’re busy chasing mice, not antelope.

The idea of shallow vs. deep work was popularized by Cal Newport in Deep Work (2016). Newport argues that people should eliminate distractions and spend more time in a state of deep focus. The kind that demands full engagement, creativity, and expertise. Shallow work, on the other hand, consists of low-value tasks that make you feel productive but actually prevent you from achieving meaningful outcomes. Organizing your to-do lists, responding to emails, and most meetings fall into this category. People don’t even enjoy these tasks, yet they consume most of their time.

Want to know if someone is truly engaged in their job? Look at their calendar and inbox. If they’re buried in recurring touchpoints, status updates, and meetings with no clear purpose, they may look busy but they aren’t getting much real work done. Unless you’re a court stenographer, sitting in meetings and taking notes isn’t why you were hired. And while you’re stuck in that meeting, neither you nor your colleagues can focus on the work that actually drives results.

Not all meetings are bad, but there are far too many of them. That’s why motivated employees try to skip meetings that don’t serve a clear purpose. As you become more senior in an organization, meetings will naturally take up more of your time but that makes it even more important to filter them carefully. Meetings should be necessary, well run, and outcome-driven. It’s no coincidence that three of Elon Musk’s top productivity rules focus on reducing meetings. You may not agree with his politics, but you can’t deny that he gets a lot of hard work done.

If your day is filled bouncing from meeting to meeting, frantically responding to emails providing information you know from the top of your head then your job is not hard. It is simply overloaded with bad, shallow work. Whether you acknowledge it or not, it’s tedious. The solution is to be focused on doing good or great work.

What is Great Work?

“There are no returns to doing “average” work (outside of make-work jobs and physical labor). All the returns come from doing *great* work, and scaling it up.” — Naval

When you closely examine “exciting” careers, you’ll see they can also be tedious due to many shallow tasks and time commitments. Professional athletes are fortunate to earn large fortunes while doing something they love, but it doesn’t mean that they enjoy every second of it. Between the time spent practicing, training, media obligations and other requirements, they end up spending a very small percentage of their time actually “playing” their sport.

For some sports performance doesn’t even matter, since their salaries are guaranteed. Basketball players can earn tens of millions of dollars per year, while barely playing. Ben Simmons has earned ~$150 million the past 4 seasons, despite playing well below 50% of his eligible games. When he did play, it was certainly nowhere near where it should be relative to his contract, even for NBA standards. If Simmons was a golfer¹ or an Olympian, he would not have made any money these past years. Luckily for him, he was fully paid. Simmons might seem like an extreme example but he’s indicative of a new generation of players, that don’t care about winning or loving basketball.

Former players and old heads alike will attribute this to players being more focused on building their personal brands instead of their performance on the court. They aren’t fully to blame, the NBA and other professional sports leagues are increasingly encouraging their athletes to be more involved on social media and promotion to help league revenues. This is why the Super Bowl has changed from a sporting event into a Taylor Swift infomercial.

Outside of sports, look at other exciting careers such as law enforcement, medicine or hostage negotiation. Hollywood will let us believe these jobs are filled with non-stop action or hooking up with colleagues, but they don’t show the countless hours of idle time or administrative paper work. A cop might patrol an area for dozens of shifts without having to do anything resembling police work. Somebody in these careers might have difficult moments but their work can also tedious. It really depends on where they work and how their organization is run.

If your goal is to do good work, eliminate or avoid busy work. Busy work is the older cousin to shallow work. Busy work are tasks that look impressive to other people but aren’t actually that valuable to the organization. An example of busy work, is when your manager asks you to prepare a whole Powerpoint presentation for information that can fit in a calendar invite. Showing up to the meeting with this done makes you and your manager look good to the other meeting participants, but in reality you probably didn’t help the meeting run any better and you could have used that time on more important things. Nothing makes people hate their jobs more than working late into the night on something that doesn’t get used. Current and former investment bankers are nodding to this.

A better use of your time could be to actually work on solutions to the problem that triggered the meeting in the first place. If your manager called a meeting to discuss a new feature a competitor is promoting, wouldn’t it be better for you to show up to the meeting with a draft of what feature you think your firm should offer instead? Wouldn’t it be stronger if you built a quick beta version you can exhibit to other stakeholders, and get their signoff for you to prepare it for production? If you just work on solving problems, instead of doing work that surrounds the actual work, you will have many more tangible accomplishments. Many problems disappear when you think deeply about what the problem really is and you focus all your efforts on fixing it right away. This is the essence of great work. Taking on difficult problems that you actually care about, and spending most of your time working on a potential solution. Shallow work won’t eliminate it, so the solution is to reduce the amount of time spent on tasks that don’t help you find a potential solution.

A popular framework to follow is The Eisenhower Matrix. Named after President Eisenhower, it helps you prioritize tasks based on how urgent and important they are. If something is Urgent and Important, you do it right away. If it’s neither urgent nor important, don’t waste time working on the task. The Eisenhower Matrix works great in theory but few people can create real value from it because they suck at distinguishing the important from the non-important. Bad managers don’t help either, especially when they treat everything as urgent.

This is why you need to take matters into your own hands. Whether you have a good manager or not, you always need to manage up. If you feel that you are overloaded with unimportant and tedious work and can’t get to the important stuff, bring this up often. Managers will rarely accept the blame if their team misses a key milestone because they were busy with side quests. If your manager is the one thrusting unimportant work on your plate, make them own it by explicitly stating you need to stop working on important task X, to accomplish non-important task Y. This distraction will likely lead to you missing the deadline you agreed on. If they say “Yes, it’s fine to postpone the original deadline because I need you to do Y” assuming they aren’t a completely unserious person, it’s harder for them to use it against you after. You are better off under promising and overdelivering, as a way to build goodwill for when you delegate and eliminate tasks you don’t see as worthy of your time.

Assuming you can consistently deliver on the important work, your manager should eventually trust that you have a good grasp of what constitutes important & urgent. This will eventually lead to more autonomy and credibility when you want to skip out on meetings and other shallow work. This isn’t easy, in some organizations and industries, especially those that are very hierarchical, your manager might not appreciate any signs that you are questioning their authority. You need to be careful about how you pushback and question work assignments, otherwise you will just come off as difficult or lazy. To earn their trust, you might need to do a lot of tedious work, especially at the beginning to show that you are a team player, willing to listen. However don’t be fooled, the goal is to eliminate work you don’t feel brings value as quickly as you reasonable can otherwise like an overgrown weed, it might be there forever. I still don’t know much about gardening, but dealing with weeds seems pretty tedious to me.

The next time you think of complaining about your job being hard, stop and ask yourself whether it’s actually difficult or are you just drowning in tedious work? Better yet, are there things you can do to make your job less tedious, so you can go back to solving real problems? Ironically if you do this exercise well, you will save yourself from a tedious role but gift yourself a hard job, but that is what you should be trying to do. Otherwise you won’t be challenging yourself or living up to your potential, making you intrinsically unmotivated in your career.

I hope you enjoyed today’s article. Please Subscribe or Share Some Feedback in the Comments

1. He definitely would have signed with LIV