Are you working or LARPing?

"Are you working hard or hardly working?" was a question I used to hear often when colleagues greeted each other.

While you may not ever be accused of "hardly working," I think we're all at grave risk of spending more time "live-action role playing" (LARPing your job, as this article puts it) than actually doing the work and serve our clients and communities well.

We spend hours writing emails, diligently browsing and responding to messages in company Slack channels, and building elegant project plans in Asana, monday.com, or Microsoft Excel.

Are we actually getting work done?

I thought about this recently while trying to figure out the best way to show the status of the projects I was working on for one of my clients. I spent time figuring out how to put the projects into an online tool. I adjusted column names and color coding. As I spent several minutes trying to learn how to show the percentage of the project that was done, I realized this was more than I needed.

I just needed to list the projects, their anticipated due dates, and priorities. Then, I talked through them with a client to be sure we were aligned on importance, order of operations, and what was needed to complete each project. I could have done that with a piece of paper!

So, I encourage you to read this article about the importance of thoughtfully choosing and building business rules around communication lines inside your organization. At a minimum, I encourage you to talk with your own team (your directs and/or your boss) about the means you use to communicate what kinds of things and the expectations for responses.

At some point, we have to put on the fancy new running shoes, don the latest cool gear we spent hours comparison shopping for, and actually put in the miles!