Are You Really Working - or Just Using Metawork as an Excuse to Avoid Real Work?

by Sid Savara on August 13, 2008

815492_computer_frustration1-115x150 photoImagine how productive you would be if you focused on just tasks that directly affected your goals - if you could do away with all distractions.  I would love to have the ability to for hours or days shield myself from tasks that don’t have any bearing on what I want to accomplish.  Unfortunately, there are certain things in my life that are not directly related to my goals, but I have to do because they either 1) help me indirectly achieve my goals, or perhaps 2) they are just what I call “life maintenance” - brushing my teeth, keeping my apartment clean, etc. One of the reasons I have a strategy to optimize how fast I read RSS feeds, as well as outsourced my cooking so I had more free time was because I wanted to clear up time to focus on doing real tasks that resulted in productive progress towards my goals.

However, that saved time can easily be squandered in metawork: tasks that may make me feel productive, but in the end produces no real results.

Real Work versus Metawork

214353_make_a_date_21-150x112 photoWhat is metawork? Metawork, executed properly, is work done to make sure you can effectively do your work.  Confused?  Perhaps it would make sense if we compare it to other meta words.  Metadata - data about data.  Metajoke - a joke about jokes.  Metameeting? A meeting about whether or not you need to plan additional meetings.  Of course, to some degree metawork is necessary - if you don’t take some steps to plan our how you will achieve your goals, you won’t know when you’ve accomplished them. Further, left without direction we tend to wander aimlessly.

As compared to metawork, real work is just plain old fashioned work that has a direct impact on progress towards completing tasks and achieving goals.

A concrete example might help here - consider someone who wants to improve their health by lifting weights.  Planning your workout schedule, thinking about how many repetitions to do, the cadence at which you want to lift the weights, which exercises to do all on which days - these are all decisions that i would classify as metawork. It’s important to consider them and have a plan of attack, but at some point you’ve got to actually to go the gym if you want any results!

Activity/Goal Productive Work Metawork
Bodybuilding
  • Weight Training
  • Running
  • Dieting
  • Planning your Workout Routine
  • Researching Gyms
  • Researching Tae Bo, Running and other cardio
  • Wondering whether you should workout before or after work
Improve Social Skills
  • Applying How to Win Friends and Influence People in your life
  • Practicing positive, open body language
  • Reading How to Win Friends and Influence People
  • Reading about body language
Learning how to Play Guitar
  • Practicing playing guitar
  • Performing for friends and at open mic nights
  • Watching other people on Youtube playing guitar
  • Downloading guitar tablature
  • Posting on craig’s list looking for band mates

So - Are You Really Working, Or Just Metaworking?

1024819_blackboard1-150x130 photoSometimes we THINK we’re working, when really all we’re doing is preparing for work we intend to do someday - work we may never get around to doing. Learning better ways of doing different tasks, testing out different software or tools to do those tasks - but not doing those tasks themselves.  I’m guilty of this myself - I kept talking to people about my blog and writing down ideas for posts, until one day I was fed up with myself, and decided it was time to start writing.  All the preparation I did was just metawork:  even after talking about it for so long, I had no blog to show for it! A certain amount of preparation before hand is encouraged and perhaps even necessary - but at some point I had to admit that spending so much time thinking up ideas to write about didn’t make sense if I wasn’t even posting anything.

If there are any tasks or goals you’ve been planning for a long time, I encourage you to stop planning until everything is just perfect, and go out there and get started.  There will always be more metawork out there to fill time - but be honest with yourself, and ask yourself:  am I doing this metawork because it’s necessary? Or am I just using it as an excuse to avoid diving in to the real tasks?

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