Purposeless Tasks

I believe that many of us spend a lot of our time in life doing meaningless work. And no, I’m not talking about going to a job you don’t currently enjoy, or doing things at work you ‘have to do’ but don’t really want to. I’m talking about the time we spend in life constantly reading reviews about ourselves. Whether that’s counting likes on social media or reading reviews through another avenue. Many of us, myself included, are guilty of creating something, putting it out into the world, and then spending an equal amount of time watching how it is perceived by the world. We count likes. We watch what people are saying. We keep going back and clicking that app like it’s a drug we’re using over and over and over again.

I think if we stepped back and asked ourselves the question: ‘What am I gaining from this?’ We would realize that we aren’t really gaining anything. At best, we get a ‘high’ from all the likes. At worst, we get depressed from the lack there of.

When I was in high school, I played football. I remember my senior year I started off the first few games doing statistically pretty good. I made it on the front page of the local newspaper two out of those first three weeks and I was super excited about that. After that time, I spent the next few weeks making sure to check exactly what the newspaper wrote about me every week. We could win a game and I would skim through an entire article checking for the one or two lines mentioning my name. What I started to notice during this time, is my production tapered. I had a few games where I didn’t play as well, and in hindsight I would attribute that to spending too much time worried about my stats and what people would write (not that there was much) about me. Individual numbers took precedent over a much larger team goal, and because of that my team and I both suffered.

On the other side of things, we had another super productive defensive player who was consistent all season. He didn’t strike me as the person who checked his stats, got obsessed over newspaper articles he was in, or did other meaningless work that I did. Truth be told, I was always a little bit envious of him. I wasn’t envious of the ‘popular people’ who spent time measuring popularity, and being sure people knew who they were. Quite the opposite. I was envious of the quietly consistent person who took a different route than the others; the person to did their work for their own reasons, without checking to get everyone else’s affirmation.

At the heart of this issue is, we all share some common traits. We all want to be liked. We want to be accepted. We want to be loved. And we want to be praised. Whether that’s in sports, with our families, in business, etc. But let’s ask ourselves this question: what kind of work are we creating if we are spending significant chunks of time ‘counting likes,’ and worrying about what people are saying about us? Is is possible that we are both hurting ourselves, and our team?

Creating ‘meaningful work’ takes time. Building trust takes time, and it comes from consistency and a commitment to doing things that others are not.

If we took a break from our ‘purposeless tasks’ to create ‘meaningful work,’ what, if anything, would we miss out on? Better yet, what could we create?