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Picked my friend up at the airport yesterday. On the way there, I listened to this April 2019 podcast from Ezra Klein about how “work is identity, and burnout is lifestyle.” The two guests are Anne Helen Petersen, who wrote a BuzzFeed article about millennials becoming the burnout generation — and Derek Thompson, who wrote the “workism” article in The Atlantic.
Fun fact on that “workism” article: I was working at an agency at the time, one of those “Everyone is so slammed!” places, and one dude — Vadim, who was on my podcast — sent that article around. No one seemed to “get” it. It was a Slack conversation that died almost instantly. Ha.
Anyway, the podcast linked above (not mine, the more popular one) has a lot of interesting points, especially if you can’t really detach yourself from work — which wouldn’t make you that unique, since we broadly deify the workaholic. Let’s tackle two points quickly.
The flattening of the to-do list
Years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I started using Trello because one contract I was on used it a lot. I liked it. So I started using it for work and personal. Eventually, my then-wife tagged onto my board, and we were doing work + work (each of us) + personal + home. Trello was like the base of everything. There was no line between work and home, personal and…
