How to Waste Time: Overworking

Almost a year ago, I wrote about how hard work adds to my (and probably your) distress. When asked how I waste the most time every day, my answer is similar: work. To be specific, endless overwork.

I wrote in “Hard Work and Distress,” the following:

As someone who grew up in the United States, there is this great emphasis on hard work and that if you do “A”, then “B” is sure to happen. I believed that for a time and worked hard as a millennial, while being gaslit by older generations about how entitled, useless, and lazy I am in the world they created, being blamed for the economy as a seventh grader when crises were hitting the fan, at one point working three jobs and still being told I’m partying too much, then working sixty to seventy hours a week, then going back to school to complete my graduate degree, only to get another job working sixty to seventy hours a week… and, (you guessed it) still being told I made some error along the way that earned me my position (a position I am actually proud of), but a position that is still seen as subpar or mediocre in the grand scheme of American excellence.

I reached a breaking point when nearly all of my efforts proved moot because the amount of work given to me was mathematically impossible to complete within the time frame allotted to me by my employer. I often end up working unpaid overtime, abandoning the work, or putting in minimal effort just to make an impossible deadline. Quality deteriorates for the sake of completion.

One might say that I should reevaluate my time management. To put it into perspective, when I was a full time baker, the expectation (according to the employee manual) was to make and decorate four cakes an hour. I could complete six an hour, sometimes ten. In a single 8-hour shift, one should be able to make a minimum of thirty-two cakes. If there were only two cake artists at a time during the day and a hundred cake orders to complete PLUS daily bakery production (typically twenty additional hours of work), then it does not become a matter of time management, but a matter of disconnected corporate management with shoddy math skills. Even if I did complete ten cakes an hour, it’s still only eighty cakes. What’s the answer to this failure to overproduce? Cut A LOT of corners—which takes a toll after a while.

This disconnect applies to nearly all jobs, whether it’s teaching, law, medicine, and especially businesses. The work is endless, and the to-do list gets exponentially longer.

Overworking for over a decade, even with investment strategies, taught me that everlasting exhaustion wastes time. For the older generation, you might have found financial and material success. For the younger generation, it is barely breaking even with no room to do anything else unless you wish to sacrifice sleep. No wonder the Chinese youth have taken part in the bai lan movement (摆烂, or let it rot in English). When you make it impossible for the youth to have a life of dignity with a clear and bright future, they will refuse to uphold a toxic system. America is no different. Caged animals rarely reproduce.

Overworking wastes our personal time, our potential, and our drive to improve not only our lives, but the lives around us. We burn out. We’ll look back and see just what nothings we actually accomplished.

Time is not just money. Time is value. Time is finite. Time is the space you spend with your friends and family. Time is the space you spend fighting for human rights. Time is the space you spend crafting and creating. Time is the space you spend appreciating the diversity of nature, the tastes and smells of the world, and the beauty of art and music. At least, that’s how we should spend our time.

Create boundaries with people and things that do not value your time.