Pulling the night shift on the killing floor of a meat processing facility

Can you even imagine how tedious work was a hundred years ago?

Nobody filled out employee engagement surveys. People didn’t pine for work life harmony. There was no such thing as taking a mental health day.

There were world wars going on. Which meant workers plowed fields and labored in factories and built things with their hands in the heat of summer and the frost of winter. And never even complained about it.

Compare that existence to today’s knowledge workers, who spend the vast majority of their workday sitting in soft chairs in relaxing offices listening to their favorite playlists, doing whatever it is they’re being paid to do.

Considering research shows the average employee only stays productive for less than three hours a day, regardless of how much time they stay in the office, going to work today is a cakewalk compared to a century ago.

Here are two data points from the bureau of labor statistics you might enjoy.

Last year there were a little over five thousand fatal work injuries recorded in this country.

One hundred years ago, that same agency documented approximately twenty three thousand deaths.

And that’s just from industrial jobs alone.

That’s important to remember anytime you think your job is hard. It’s not. Most of us have no idea what hard is.

My three hardest jobs in my career were being a busboy at a barbecue restaurant, selling couches at discount furniture warehouses, and being a valet parker at a luxury hotel. It’s not exactly coal mining.

For that reason, anytime I’m tasked with an assignment that’s tedious, part of me says, okay, let’s just power through this god awful spreadsheet and be thankful we’re not pulling the night shift on the killing floor of a meat processing facility.

Somehow that comparison helps me discipline myself to execute work that’s monotonous and time consuming without delay.

And believe me, there is nobody who tries to avoid people and situations that are tedious, that require hire effort and maintenance more than me. Optimizing for joy, comfort and independence is my religion.

But sometimes you have no choice. You have to sit down in front of your screen for three straight hours and pound this goddamn thing out. Because otherwise it simply won’t get done. Ever.

Particularly when you work on a team. Tedious work always gets pushed down to the bottom of the list, because nobody wants to do it, and everybody assumes someone else will do it before they get to it.

Which is totally understandable, the only problem is, it almost always creates bottlenecks. Projects drag on for weeks and even months, because nobody wants to get their hands dirty and unclog the equivalent of a shitty toilet.

It reminds me of my uncle, who worked alongside my father and grandfather for four decades. Tom always volunteered for the tedious work. Whether it was relabeling boxes in the warehouse or temporarily fixing the flooding roofs to protect company inventory, he had no bones about strapping on his wader pants and trudging around in the muck.

Tom either loved doing, or at least resigned himself to doing, the one thing anybody could, but everybody assumed somebody else would.

That lesson always stuck with me. I find it’s not only useful to frontload the suffering when it comes to tedious work, but it’s also deeply fulfilling.

You have to think of it as a gift your future self needs. An investment in yourself that you’ll recoup later on. You view certain activities, tasks, projects, rituals, habits, practices, as future gains. Even if the immediate gain isn’t yet realizable, you’ll still give yourself leverage down the road.

What tedious task can you no longer afford to put off? What gift would you be giving to yourself and those on your team by finishing it today?

Believe me, it’s a thankless job. Nobody is going to congratulate you on wading through the shit.

But when you raise your hand to do what needs to be done, and not demanding recognition or applause for your efforts, your value increases.

What if you spent one hour a day focusing on doing the things that anybody could do, but won’t?