:: The best jobs give their workers agency, and those workers tend to be happy. They get to be creative, and come up with neat ideas, and execute those ideas. Whereas jobs where workers do not have agency tend to have workers who burn out. If you don’t have agency, what can you do?
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Updated June 28, 2023
I’m in the middle of writing a(nother) book on mental health and higher ed, and in it I have a chapter on burnout. The chapter takes on the psychology of burnout and really does the research. Burnout is a serious mental health condition, and deserves more attention. The chapter I wrote is solid. (Also check out two great books on burnout: one by Rebecca Pope-Ruark and another by the Nagoski sisters.)
But some conversations with friends over the past few weeks have gotten me thinking about burnout in another way, which reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend Ariane back in 2012 or so. My friend Ariane and I drew the sketch below at a coffee shop.
The Urgency Chart
The sketch is a four-by-four chart. On the y-axis are the words “not urgent” (on the lower row) and “urgent” on the top row. Across the top x-axis are two columns, labeled “not important” and “important.” (This chart is a version of something called an “Eisenhower Box.” You can look it up if you’d like.)
I call it the “Urgency Chart.”
Here are how the quadrants read:
✤ Under “Urgent/Not Important”: “Ignore this until it becomes not urgent.” This is Quadrant 1. (This name becomes important later.)
✤ Under “Urgent/Important”: “Do this now!” This is Quadrant 2.
✤ Under “Not Urgent/Not Important”: “Never do this.” This is Quadrant 3.
✤ Under “Not Urgent/Important”: “Do this later.” This is Quadrant 4.
According to the Urgency Chart, the only quadrant that requires immediate action are urgent, important things. And unimportant things should never be done, ever.
Ariane and I realized that the place we wanted to live was in Quadrant 4. In Quadrant 4, the work is important, but we are also able to take time to do things carefully, slowly, without our hair on fire or any other body part. In Q4, we get to make our own schedules.
And, because urgent, important things do pop up and you do have to deal with them, Quadrant 4 gives you the time to deal with those things. For example, right now, I’m working on a book, but I want to work on my schedule. My schedule includes buffer time, which gives me space for a surgery I needed in December and space for sledding with my kids this weekend.
For me, then, Quadrant 4 means being in control of my schedule, that schedule allows for important stuff to pop up unexpectedly. Because that’s life.
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This notion of “being in control” reminded me to another sketch that Ariane and I drew around the same time as the Urgency Chart, which I called the Agency Chart.
I kept this sketch on the bulletin board above my desk at work for years. It was something like a mantra: Agency Master Legacy. Unfortunately, I don’t have the original anymore (!!), lost in my move from my office when I left my job. Here’s the version I wrote in my notebook:
The photo depicts a page from my notebook that reads “Agency > Mastery > Legacy.”
I’ve realized that the Urgency Chart doesn’t make sense without also understanding “agency” in the context of the Agency Chart. Here’s why.
In order to be awesome at what you do, in work, at home, whatever, you have to have the freedom to be awesome. That freedom is agency.
When you don’t have agency, you don’t have the power to ignore the unimportant work that wastes your time. This work can be at a job or it can be work at home. For example, you might have to spend your time on unimportant things that other people make you do (think TPS reports from the movie Office Space). If you see the movie, you might recall that things don’t end well.
They don’t end well because the workers do not have agency.
When you don’t have agency, when you finally get to the things that you want to do, you either have run out of time or you are just too tired. In short, when you don’t have agency, you don’t have control over your life or how you spend your time.
Having agency doesn’t mean you avoiding a 9-to-5 job. Most of us don’t have that luxury.
You can have a 9-to-5 and have plenty of agency. The best jobs give their workers agency, and those workers tend to be happy. They get to be creative, and come up with neat ideas, and execute those ideas.
Whereas jobs where workers do not have agency have workers who burn out.
If you don’t have agency, you do not get to make choices about the work that you do, and you tend to get stuck in Quadrant 1 of the Urgency Chart, rushing around doing pointless work until you fall down one day and realize you don’t want to get up again. You burn out. That’s what happened to me at my last “real” job. It’s why I left.
If you don’t have agency, you do not get to make choices about the work that you do. Worse, you likely have lots of people making unreasonable demands on your time, so you feel a sense of urgency all the time, rushing around doing pointless work until you fall down one day and realize you don’t want to get up again. You tend to get stuck in Quadrant 1 of the Urgency Chart.
Now, let’s look at all of this long term, because the long term matters—burnout matters, and how we fix it matters.
Take a look at the Agency Chart again. Look at what comes next: Mastery. Legacy. If you don’t have agency, then you can never get to mastery. Mastery happens when you feel accomplished or skilled at something. Mastery feels really, really good, because it feels good to be good at something. Once you have mastery, then you can create something that leaves a legacy. Because I’m a writer, I talk about writing books. Books feel like a legacy to me.
And if you are stuck in a place with no agency, then you can’t reach mastery. And if you can’t reach mastery, then you can’t leave a legacy—which, because of the human condition, is what we are all wired to do in some fashion. We want what we do to “matter” in some way (hopefully in the right way, and not in some ego-driven, narcissistic way that fills some empty hole created by crushing anxiety, and someone please put down that mirror you are holding up to my face).
I can describe what it meant to lack agency in higher ed and why I left teaching full time. I can describe what it means to have agency (or not) in publishing and why I left a big project behind because the editor micromanaged the book to death.
But I can’t talk about lack of agency in, say, nursing, because I’ve never worked as a nurse. From the stories I’ve read, nurses who used to love their work do not love it anymore because now everything is always on fire. They live in Quadrant 1. If everything is always on fire where you work, then you don’t have agency. You have nothing but third-degree burns.
If you’re stuck in a job (whether in the home or without) and can’t figure out why you feel overwhelmed or hopeless, I hope this small bit of wisdom helps diagnose what you are feeling.
(I did not invent the Agency Chart, by the way, I stole it from my colleague Ariane, who stole it from her dad, and from there…who knows. If you know, email me.)
You might be feeling a lack of agency. The inability to make choices. A perpetual wearing down that leaves little room for yourself. You do not have the space to be awesome. And you definitely need that space.
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So what do you do?
Let me reassure you: you do not have to start by making drastic changes.
Instead, you can start by scaling back a little. At home, for example, let things slide a bit. Do what you need to do to feel good for yourself, and let the rest go. I had to learn to do this, and IT WAS HARD. HARD, I SAY.
I’m not telling you “just stop worrying about it.” Telling someone “don’t worry,” or “just relax,” or anything of that nature just doesn’t work. So instead, I’m telling you to tell yourself that, in whatever way works for you. What’s the difference? The way that worked for me comes from the great book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by the Nagoski sisters. They taught me about “Human Giver Syndrome”; when I learned about being a human giver, I saw myself. I gave too much of myself, too much of the time, to things that didn’t matter very much, because I felt guilty if I didn’t.
And once I had a diagnosis as a Giver, I was able to cure the problem. (I highly recommend the book!)
In short, if you can stop giving too much of yourself to those who don’t give a crap about you (or the laundry, which also doesn’t give a crap about you), you can use the energy you’ve saved to make space for yourself.
In that space, you can make something for yourself—you can find your agency. Slowly, that space will get bigger and bigger. It just will, I promise. Like a field of dandelions let loose. Dandelions are not weeds. They’re sunny yellow energy balls that turn into creativity bombs that grow more energy balls, and on and on. Let loose, friends.
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If you enjoyed this piece, you will enjoy my book, LIFE OF THE MIND INTERRUPTED: ESSAYS ON MENTAL HEALTH AND DISABILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION, available at lifeofthemindinterrupted.com. Buying my books is a great way to support the online writing that I do for free.
Thank you.
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