The Antidote to Workplace Hustle Culture

Last week I got on a coaching call with a client. 2 minutes in, she began crying. 47 minutes later, she was still crying. She was burned out... to a crisp. 

 

At minute 52, we got a deep breath into her, and she began listing her priorities for me. And there were many. “I know we’re supposed to be setting boundaries and doing the self-care thing,” she told me, “but I can’t afford to spend my days meditating and taking walks. I have a big job to do!”

 

And that was the moment when I almost started crying. She had articulated something I realize so many are struggling with right now: this toxic belief that we’re either succeeding or chanting in a warm bath.

 

This unwillingness to believe that we can succeed while caring for ourselves and our teams is the epitome of hustle culture. It’s the mentality that a minute not spent grinding out work is a minute wasted, that more is always better, and that rest and relaxation are for the weak. 

 

Unlike toxic productivity—which is driven by an internal need to always be busy—hustle culture is a bundle of awfulness perpetuated by a whole organization or team.

What signals might you spot in an organization suffering from the hustle?

• Items are only added to to-do lists, never subtracted
• Lunch breaks are comedy—everyone laughs at them 
• There is always discussion of the next thing, with no pause to recognize or celebrate what’s already been achieved
• No one has asked about your boundaries
• Vacation days are to be collected but rarely spent

Do any of these feel familiar? If so, what can you do to begin to make a change at your workplace?  

 

The antidote to hustle culture isn’t doing less work. It’s doing work more mindfully with more purpose, intention, and focus on impact over activity. Here are some practices you can use to start to muzzle the hustle.

1. Ask better questions 

Hustle culture values quantity while anti-hustle strives for impact.

 

When a new project or initiative pops up within a hustle culture, project owners tend to ask questions like:

• When do you need it completed?
• What’s my budget?
• What are the key performance indicators to track?

These are the type of questions my sobbing client would typically ask her boss. But these all presume that of course she’s going to get it done—she just needs some basic facts to start with.

But in an anti-hustle culture, we’d be asking better questions...

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