Authors Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel call this third phenomenon “live action role-playing the job.” In “overwork” work cultures, those who appear to perform well are often the ones who are rewarded.

A big part of the problem is we’re still measuring and rewarding knowledge work with outdated factory metrics focused on “inputs” like presence and hours on the job, rather than the more meaningful “outputs” like performance, impact, and value.

So, we’re rewarding the wrong things – showing up at meetings, answering late-night emails, rushing around the office, and “looking productive” – rather than being productive and innovative. That makes work less effective and steals time from our lives outside of work.

It's also a big reason why workers with care responsibilities, who are still primarily women, often can’t seem to get ahead in so many workplaces that value inputs rather than outputs. They simply can’t put in the same number of hours and presence. Even though these are wrong-headed metrics!

When we’re busy and have that high-octane, panicked feeling that time is scarce, our attention and ability to focus narrow. In that heightened state of time scarcity and busyness, we can only concentrate on the most immediate – and often most low-value – tasks in front of us.

3. You mentioned “busyness,” and busyness culture seems to be pervasive. How do we drive change in company culture to help improve gender equality and work-life balance?

Changing an entrenched work culture is difficult. I had a front-row seat to a project that tried. In 2018, the behavioral design firm ideas42 kicked off a project to better understand what drives people to overwork and to test interventions that would improve individual work-life conflict and well-being.

For an ideal work-life balance workplace, designers imagined leaders who were open about taking lunch breaks, working flexibly, going on vacation, and sharing more about their lives, families, and care responsibilities outside of work. They then designed, implemented, and tested practical interventions focused on four key pain points:

• Long hours
• Endless and often pointless meetings
• The guilt people felt taking vacations
• Email

One intervention asked workers to schedule big calendar blocks for their most important uninterrupted work, rather than expecting it to just happen at some point during the workweek. The designers encouraged workers to create open space in their calendars every week so that they had a built-in cushion in case they had underestimated the time a project would really take, or in case an unanticipated emergency cropped up. Intentional scheduling that you share with co-workers makes it much more apparent that calling a meeting involves a trade-off.

The intervention also called for organizations to design and enforce better “meeting hygiene.” Many meetings are a waste of productive time. In the intervention, an agenda would be circulated before every meeting listing clear goals to keep things short and focused. Those calling the meeting were encouraged to be judicious about who needed to be included.

People were trained to think about when a meeting was really required – to debate, discuss, or decide issues – and when updates could be more effectively made asynchronously through other means – for example, in project management software like Notion or Asana, in email or Slack messages, or in shared Google Docs.

To encourage time for rest and vacation, some organizations experimented with nudging workers to put their summer breaks on their calendars in the first quarter, when the summer months were likely to be clear. Planning early would force teams to map out how to meet deadlines and delegate tasks so people would not feel compelled to work on vacation.

My colleagues helped design vacation prep checklists and encouraged organizations to experiment with allocating two vacation “transition days” on each end of the vacation, with the only expectation being that they use the time to disconnect and reconnect with work.

One organization adopted a “vacation roulette” intervention. The HR team found every person who hadn’t used their vacation days over a 90-day period and sent them a note reminding them of their vacation balance and copying their manager.

Another organization experimented with closing down between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Research in Sweden found that when everyone takes vacation at the same time, there’s less guilt, a big boost to mental health, and the entire organization benefits from “collective restoration.”

My ideas42 colleagues also designed a tool to enable workers to pause their email inboxes. They sent reminders to people at the end of each workday asking whether they had paused their inboxes and amplified the effort with a campaign to affirm people’s identities outside of work.

4. Which interventions improved destructive work culture? Which didn’t?

Vacation-taking interventions in particular led to encouraging results. Interventions to ease the pain of email were, perhaps unsurprisingly, among the least successful.

The ones that didn’t work were those aimed at individuals taking individual action to improve their personal work-life balance. Those that were more successful involved a change to the entire system.

Leaders at many of the organizations had the best of intentions. They expressed a desire for better work- life balance for everyone. But they, too, were caught up in the prevailing busyness culture. Many knew they weren’t walking the talk, yet they appeared powerless to change themselves or their busyness cultures.

5. What advice would you give your younger self?

I’d tell my younger self: You don’t need to worry so much. Maybe things won’t turn out like you thought they would, but so much of life is what you make with what you have, where you are. And maybe your imagination was a little out of focus to begin with.

I’d tell her to trust more and that failure is something to be learned from.

I would tell her to be more curious than afraid. And to trust her instincts more.

I’d tell her to take some time to be quiet, to breathe, to notice, and to make sure the dreams she’s chasing are really hers.

I’d tell her to seek help and learn from mentors, rather than thinking she’s not worthy of it, and, in turn, to help and mentor others.

And, most importantly, to enjoy the journey along the way. Don’t wait. Don’t get trapped in if-then thinking – "If I do this,” or “Once this happens,” then I can, or then I get to do something fun. Leisure, rest, time to love and to enjoy life are part of what makes for a rich and wholehearted life. They don’t have to be earned.

I’d tell her to do meaningful work, love fully and well, take time to play, and expand the frame. Maybe you won’t get it right every day. Or every week. But keep at it. Life is practice. Maybe the house will be a mess, but an afternoon blowing bubbles with your three-year-old is priceless. Life is lived in the extraordinary, awful, and ordinary moments right now. Embrace it all.