Effective

Chapter 6Effectiveness Through Battling Work Intensification

I found a funny screenshot on my phone the other day. It was a little slice of my Outlook calendar from a prior job—I’d captured it because I’d hit a new peak, or a new low, depending on how you look at it: I was quintuple-scheduled.

That’s not a typo. There were five concurrently scheduled meetings that I was expected to be in. Now, I could tell you that this was a consequence of my incredible effectiveness as a consulting leader—that I’d created unprecedented demand for my amazing skills. But instead I’m going to, as my daughter and her friends would say, “be so for real here”: this is a normal thing that happens across the corporate world all of the time. We live in a world of so many meetings that it’s not unusual for the same person to have four or five, or more, meetings at the same time. I knew one guy who’d figured out how to actually join multiple meetings at once, but even he, a certified legend, could only swing three at a time through a combination of phones and laptops.

The overgrowth of meetings is just one manifestation of a world of work intensification—the challenging phenomenon we’ll spend this chapter talking about. Every kind of work has a version of this increasingly overloaded way of working; a 2019 New York Times article on the overloaded and chaotic days of app delivery drivers is stressful to even read, describing drivers trying to respond to an unpredictable series of app-driven “pings,” ...