Remote Work for Humans

A Day in the Life of a Burned Out Epidemiologist

If you are like me, you start your day with two applications: Outlook and Teams. From there, you see what’s at the top of the notifications pile. Perhaps you already have 68 unread emails or 3 teams chats glowing in your direction. You read through all of them and start to plan your attack to tackle all of the tasks that just came in.

The “new” of the tasks pushes back the other tasks that have been on the back burner for weeks. Nobody’s pinged you about them, so they must not be urgent. You don’t really have visibility on your coworkers’ days but you imagine that they are, like you, busy. You obviously can’t contribute to their pings by asking for help.

How Did We Get Here?

I think about the culture of public sector work from my own experiences as an epidemiologist in the public sector. My earliest experience of public sector work as a student working at a state health department was of dedicated workers. People who truly wanted to serve the public interest and who had developed specialized knowledge in their field in order to do so.

Since my first student gig, I’ve worked at the federal, state and local public sector levels and I saw the same themes come up both in my in person work and my remote work.

Interestingly, those themes line up very neatly with the signs of overwork identified in the book Never Not Working: Why the Always on Culture Is Bad for Business – and How to Fix It by Malissa Clark.

• Signs of Workaholic Behavior
  • Rumination: Always thinking about work
  • Over commitment: Always Taking on Too Much and Not Knowing Limits
  • Busyness: Always Doing
  • Perfectionism: Nothing is Ever Good Enough

Our organizations, politicians, and culture tend to celebrate overwork as an achievement in and of itself. We reward productivity at all costs but rarely want to look at the quality of our work or the depth of our work. Efforts to do so are often sidelined at the expense of urgency. The value of focusing on how we work cannot be overstated.

To quote Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity:

To embrace slow productivity, in other words, is to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output.

It is possible in most modern work settings, if you’re willing to be creative—and perhaps, at times, even radical—in how you think about selecting and organizing your work.

Choosing How to Work

While it can make intellectual sense to invest time in how we work, the cultural and organizational practices mentioned above can make it feel impossible to carve out time to do this. You don’t need to spend a lot of your time doing this but you do need to make thinking about how work gets done a priority.

20 – 30 minutes – Hours of Relief

It’s hard to overstate how impactful small, intentional, moments are over time. Most of us would be hard pressed to find 2-3 hours of uninterrupted focus time to reorient our work the way Newport describes. Fortunately, we don’t need to do that.

Starting small and starting where you are is enough.

The more you practice this, the more effective your 20-30 minutes will be each day.

There are several ways to go about this but the exercise is to take a work process, and dedicate 20 – 30 minutes to thinking about how the work actually gets done.

Essential Components of Thinking About How You Work:

• Understand the process as it is now, not how you wish it was
  • The more neutrally you can document each step of the work as it exists the more success you will have improving it (even if it’s driving you crazy)
• Understand your span of control
  • Sometimes you will be improving a process that only you work on
  • Other times you may be thinking through a complex process with many collaborators
  • Understanding where your influence begins and ends is essential
  • You don’t have to be a manager to create change and you also don’t have to stress about things outside of your control
• Understand process bottlenecks and headaches
  • Putting language to the pain points many people may be feeling is powerful
  • Try to emphasize parts of the process that are bottlenecks, rather than people who are bottlenecks (unless you are their direct manager, the people part is not in your span of control)
  • Calling out how much time could be saved with concrete examples is also helpful, though you may not always have that metric
• Understand Where and When to Share Your Findings
  • You don’t need to be a manager to shape these changes but you do need to know where and when to share process improvements
  • This will vary from team to team but I’ve had the most success with the following:
    • Bring up to my manager in our 1:1 – cite concerns from previous smaller team meetings.
      • Bonus points if it clears up a headache for them
    • Bring up to the team that works on the process to get their buy in

You 20 minutes could look like this:

Weekday	20- 30 minute activity
Monday	Identify a work process to refine or reform. A recurring process is often the easiest place to start but this could be done for any process.
Tuesday	Document how this process actually occurs now. (Don’t think of improvements just yet, though some will come to mind) You are aiming for loose documentation or a schematic of each step of the process, not a fully fleshed out SOP.
Wednesday	Thinking about what you documented, identify bottlenecks or opportunities for improvement. What do you have direct control over? Where do you need to reach out for help?
Thursday	Think about times that the process has cost you/your team more time than necessary due to the bottle necks. Refine your solutions based on real examples as they crop up. You don’t have to fix anything now.
Friday	Develop a plan for improving the process. Who do you need to get involved? What would motivate them to enact the changes you suggest? (hint – most people like saving time and not feeling overwhelmed)

Note that the above is just an example of what this work could look like. It doesn’t really matter if you do something everyday, as long as you set an intention to try each week.

Starting small with one project or work process will help get your brain in the habit of thinking this way. Rather than jumping from task to task as it hits your inbox, you’re finding strategy and thinking about how to work deeper. The more you practice this the easier it will become, but it does take practice. Fortunately for us, small intention steps over time add up.

Starting the Day with Clarity

You may still start your day with Outlook and Teams even after improving work processes. But my hope is that you begin to open those applications with intention, not dread. If nothing else, you will know that you can take small, intentional steps to improve work for you and your team.