The trap of work-adjacent tasks

After over a decade of working for tech companies, I recently decided to go off on my own and become a freelancer. It has been two months since I left my last job at Airbnb, where I genuinely loved my colleagues and the work we were doing but had a difficult time with how we had to get our work done inside a constantly growing and changing organization. In the months since I’ve left, I am realizing quite a bit about how I think and work best now that I spend most of my days alone. In every prior job I’ve ever had, I was in a buzzing office environment, where I was surrounded by the collective intelligence and energy of my colleagues but was also subject to the distractions that come along with that environment.

One of the things I’ve been noticing and reflecting on is how I get work done now that I am not supported nor distracted by my lovely colleagues. While designing a learning workshop, for example, I can no longer pop into Slack or turn my head to the person at the next desk and ask “Hey, can I get your thoughts on this for a second?” I now have to work deliberately to create all on my own, and solicit feedback on my work from collaborators or the client only when I have something substantial to show them (and usually in an asynchronous way, like email). This means I have to force my brain into focused-creative-mode more often — which I very much enjoy, but is undeniably more challenging and requires more discipline than when I could phone a friend as soon as things got difficult during the creative process.

This, of course, is also a good thing — traditional office environments have their benefits, but one of their many downsides is how challenging it is for workers to not get swept up in what I call “work-adjacent tasks.” If the essence of the work is anything that directly contributes to the creation of something — a product or process, for example — work-adjacent tasks are everything else with which we fill our long weekdays.

When I worked at Facebook, the most common example of this was the Workplace product. For the majority of people in the world who are likely unfamiliar, people who work at Facebook use Workplace as an internal communications tool, which is a repurposed version of the core Facebook product that only employees can access. Projects and products have groups, just like in the public Facebook product, where employees can post, read updates, and comment. Even if Workplace only contained groups that were directly related to work projects, it would already be a highly-distracting communication tool, since the work at a company like Facebook is never-ending and therefore the content related to that work is never-ending. But Workplace also contains groups about a variety of other topics — hobbies and interests that employees share, a marketplace where employees sell each other their lightly-used goods, and most notably, groups about working at Facebook. There are groups dedicated to specific office locations, parking lots and transportation, and the three meals a day (plus snacks!) that are provided to employees free of charge. As you might expect, these groups about working at Facebook get the most activity and the most drama. It’s often hard to look away, even if you’re not directly engaging in the conversation, because it’s entertaining. One could fill an entire week simply jumping around from group to group, reading and commenting on updates. Said another way: One could fill an entire week of “work” at Facebook doing work-adjacent tasks while never meaningfully contributing to the company’s products.

Workplace is an extreme example, but almost all companies that employ primarily knowledge workers have some version of this, be it Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Groups. They all make it easier for us to feel more connected to the work and our fellow employees, but they are also where most of our work-adjacent time goes. Doing work-adjacent tasks on the clock makes us feel like we are somehow being “good” or at least “not-as-bad-as-we-could-be” at work when we’re not actually working. But what we’re doing is just skirting the edge of work while killing time, for example: staying in the loop on broad company news that doesn’t directly affect us, communicating with friendly colleagues with whom we don’t work that closely, or sending out mass updates about your work to people who don’t necessarily need this information to do their jobs.

In contrast to browsing the Internet, taking a nap, or calling our moms, work-adjacent tasks seem pretty harmless. Often it starts innocuously: we have a few minutes between meetings, so we’re just going to scan some Slack channels. Or we’ve had a tough day mentally and we want to stay in work mode, but not do anything too cognitively demanding, so we’ll just check a social Google Group for a second. After doing this a few times, we build neural pathways and therefore a habit of checking these tools whenever we have a few free minutes, or are tired, or just can’t even. It’s exactly the same habit we have in our personal lives: When we are standing in line at the grocery store or we just need a break, we open Instagram or Twitter because it’s easier than doing almost anything else. Craig Mod, in his excellent newsletter Roden, recently put this succinctly: “What I find most dangerous about Twitter is that it can generate similar chemical feelings to having done ‘the work,’ when in fact, you haven’t done the work.”

The proliferation of work-adjacent tasks through distracting company tools is not the fault of the people who work for these companies. It’s the product of an American work culture that prioritizes keeping people in offices for eight-plus hours a day, five-plus days per week. We don’t often question this norm — we assume that this is inherently the best way to do things — and most Americans spend most of their adult lives working full-time jobs and using all of their willpower and energy to just get through the week. It’s no wonder we’re looking for distractions or easy ways out, because this is highly unnatural and somewhat painful. Furthermore, it’s not even that productive.

I always had a difficult time with being in an office 40 or more hours per week, and it never got easier, even after doing it for 11 years. I also felt shameful about the amount of time I spent in an office doing work-adjacent tasks, either because I wanted to distract myself or someone else wanted to be distracted. Now that I’m freelancing, I am blown away at how quickly I get work done when the work is the only thing I’m doing. Recently, I estimated a task would take me three hours, but when I actually sat down to do it, it only took 45 minutes. I’m also surprised by how much I enjoy using time tracking software (I like Toggl, in case anyone’s looking for a recommendation), because it encourages me to only work when I am working and to not work at all when I am not working. Rather than opening a Google Doc on my phone at 9:30 pm to passively read comments someone recently made, I wait until the next morning, when I can sit down at my computer, open Toggl, and actually process and respond to those comments on the clock. The quality of my work then increases, and so does the quality of my attention to the present moment. It’s a win-win.

Not everyone can, should, or wants to freelance, and people who work in-house at companies need to have channels for communication and tools for collaboration that freelancers don’t. That said, the number of tools we use and the amount of time we spend on them are both probably far higher than they should be. Workers are filling in the hours of their artificially-long workdays with work-adjacent tasks not because they are lazy, but because they probably shouldn’t be sitting there that long in the first place. If there was less emphasis on time spent at your desk and more emphasis on your work output and quality, we probably wouldn’t see as much time spent on work-adjacent tasks. We might see people going outside more, spending more time on leisure and hobbies, and generally living fuller lives. It’s no wonder more and more people are moving to remote work and freelancing, because more and more people are realizing that the way we work isn’t working for them. Even if you have no intention of becoming a freelancer, there’s something to be learned from working like you’re only getting paid when you’re doing billable work — or as Cal Newport says in Deep Work, “When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.”

The irony of all this is that the very thing that tends to trap us in an overly-collaborative, always-on work culture — technology — is the very thing that’s setting us free. When you can take your laptop anywhere, yes, you can always be asked to do some work, but you can also choose to reject the premise that you should be in an office for most of your waking life. If you can, take your laptop to a cafe and work in a focused way until you need a break, then stop working for a little while. If you get stuck or need a break, take a walk outside instead of clicking over to email or Slack. Technology can trap us, but it can also enable us to work in the way we want, when and where we want. It’s all in how we use it.