The Joy of Work

April 24, 2020 Bruce Daisley

By: Bruce Daisley
With everyone constantly connected to their work via smart devices, that stress has
spilled out of the workplace and into our private lives. Bruce cites a study that showed half of
all people who check their emails outside of work show the highest recordable levels of
stress.
Bruce emphasizes the importance of sleep, that it improves our quality of life in
multiple ways and yet people feel they need to battle to get a minimum of seven hours. Rest
and disconnecting yourself from work are arguably the best ways to improve your ability to
come up with new ideas.
He also observes that the best ideas often come when we’re not desperately trying to think
of them. The sudden flash of brilliance will hit you in the shower, or at the gym, but more
may come if developers simply allow themselves to relax when they’re not at work.
“If you’re sitting there at your laptop thinking, ‘I need an idea, I need an idea’, your ideas
often come when you load your brain up with stimulus and then you stop doing things,”
Bruce opines. “And we’ve got out of the zone of stopping doing things. When was the last
time you weren’t stimulated? You get your phone out when you’re in the lift, you get your
phone out all the time.”
Bruce states that there is lots of over-reliance on meetings at tech firms, particularly when
meetings don’t seem to accomplish much beyond re-emphasising some sort of project
hierarchy or planning for a future meeting. He argues that meetings fill some sort of
imagined void, but the time could be spent much more productively.
“Work is this lie we tell ourselves,” says Bruce. “We all have this notion where we’re hustling,
we’re trying to work longer and harder. If you’re a boss, you look in someone’s calendar and
see no meetings planned, the first thought is they’re doing nothing. We’ve reached this stage
where we believe if people are not doing meetings or emails, they’re not working.”
He argues: “When we see an empty calendar, we think people aren’t busy, rather than
saving the space for creativity.”
He concludes: “A creative office is one where there’s way more face-to-face conversations.
When whoever it was hacked work, they got rid of face-to-face conversations. We’ve all got
headphones on because we’ve all got so many demands on us, we just want to get the
responsibility we’ve got, the guilt we’ve got about not getting back to that email or running
late for that meeting, and that means we’re not given the capacity to think and have the time
to actually do things.
He adds by stating “If the operating system we work in is stress, if the default answer you
reach for about work is you’re busy, then you’re killing your capacity to be that inventive
version of yourself you know you used to have in there. — stress kills our capacity to be
creative and inventive. All the time we agree to do one extra meeting, all the time we’re
sitting on the sofa swiping away at a few emails, we’re killing the best version of ourselves.
And the best version of ourselves is the only chance we’ve got to beat the robots.”