www.lifehack.org: You would think that working really, really hard is the best guarantee of advancement in your career. If you put in tons of effort, in the end you will get noticed, right?
The reality is quite different though. There’s a reason why employees are expected to work around 40 hours a week, and why they get paid vacations (although the number of weeks vary per country).
3 comments:
I guess this is good for when you actually start a career, but half of these things do not apply to students. 1-Although this is true, we don't really control how much work we are given, so we must work until it is satisfactory, even if that means we pull an all-nighter right before a project is due. 2-Again, we don't control how much work we are given. Granted we could just opt not to do some projects, that wouldn't be very useful to us in the long run as we try to get good grades in order to graduate/not get kicked out. 3-This is one that could actually apply to students. I know quite a few people that will work really hard for long hours and then not realize that by working longer hours and not resting they are actually limiting how productive they could be. 4-Well, I guess that makes sense for when you are in a position where you can delegate things, but with school work that is called academic dishonesty. As a designer, would you be able to delegate many things? I suppose for scenic you could get a draftsman to do all of your drafting for you after you do the initial design, but I don't know about the other sections...5-This one applies to students. Many people try to multitask in the studio by watching TV while working on a project, but then it just takes away some of the focus on the project and you end up working longer because you were only processing at half speed thanks to the interesting TV show that you were looking up to watch instead of continually working on the project in front of you. 6-This does and doesn't apply to students. Working late in studio could mean that you slacked before hand and didn't get it done, that you couldn't handle the project so you are just trying to get something together at the last minute, or that you are so dedicated to getting it perfect that you want to spend every minute possible making it as close as possible to your ideal. I actually think I might start rating the amount I put into a project by this scale. I wonder how well that might work out for me...
This article makes some interesting points but I don't think they are all applicable to working in the theater industry. I do definitely agree with the first point though. Anyone who knows me knows that I need my 8 hours of sleep. I simply can't function without them. Also when I'm working long hours all day, especially outside of school, it means that I tend to eat more unhealthily, more take-out and fewer home cooked meals. This starts taking its tole on my body pretty quickly. As to the other points, I definitely don't agree with points 3,4, and 5. Especially when working on a show, sometimes it doesn't matter how smart you work or how much you delegate or prioritize, there simply aren't always enough hours in the day, or people to delegate to, to finish a project. I had this experience over break. I was working with the guy who I'm working with over the summer and he was working on building 2 shows at the same time that both opened this weekend. While it's true that maybe he shouldn't have taken on as much work as he did, we had to finish both projects, no matter how many hours it took. That included painting until the wee hours of the morning on opening day. Sometimes that's just what it takes. While these tips might be true in an office, they aren't aways as easy to follow in theater especially in the real world.
This article tries to make an interesting claim, but I basically disagree with most of it. There seems to also be a disconnect between what this person views as working hard, and killing yourself to get the job done. I personally enjoy working hard and being productive and when people work for me I look for the same thing. To me, working hard shows passion for the work, commitment to the project, drive, and ambition. When people work for me, my biggest turn off is laziness. Especially in our field, I think you should be passionate about your work. If you just want to come in, do the work and leave, you should have picked a different career.
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