Quiet Quitting is a term that recently captured a lot of working people’s imagination. To Quiet Quit means doing the bare minimum at your job. Put the least amount of effort required and do no more than expected out of you. Do not go beyond the call of duty. Shut your laptop at five. Check-out of work – mentally, physically, and emotionally. Sorry boss. I am done.
So that is where society is right now. Young people are being encouraged to no longer ‘give it their all’ at work. Why give up your work-life balance, your potential mental and physical health and get not much in return? Sure, one needs a job and salary to make ends meet, but why give it more than the absolute minimum?
In theory, there’s some logic to the arguments above. Unfortunately, Quiet Quitting doesn’t work in practical terms. A young person seen to Quiet Quit by his seniors will be seen as mediocre, unmotivated and not-proactive at work. None of these are good things. Quiet Quitting is eventually discovered, noticed, judged and ultimately, detrimental to your career. However, before we discuss Quiet Quitting further, it is interesting to note another contrasting post that went viral.
In India, Shantanu Deshpande, Founder and CEO of Bombay Shaving Company, made a post on Linkedin urging youngsters to work hard, implying the extreme opposite of Quiet Quitting. Here’s the verbatim post:
“When you are 22 and new in your job, throw yourself into it. Eat well and stay fit, but put in the 18 hour days for at least 4-5 years. I see a LOT of youngsters who watch random content all over and convince themselves that ‘work life balance, spending time with family, rejuvenation bla bla’ is important. It is, but not that early. That early, worship your work. Whatever it is. The flex you build in the first 5 years of your career carries you for the rest of it. Don’t do random rona-dhona. Take it on the chin and be relentless. You will be way better for it.”
Whoa! Eighteen-hour workdays! Is that what our business-owners expect now?
Anyway, we have the ‘bare-minimum’ Quiet-Quit advocates on side. We also have the ’18-hours a day’ and ‘don’t do random rona-dhona’ proponents on the other. What on earth is the right strategy? What is a lowly humble worker to do?
As often in life, both extremes are wrong. Eighteen hours a day of work on a sustained basis is practically impossible. Our enthusiastic CEO above says, “Eat well and stay fit, but put in the 18-hour workdays.” Ahem sir, how many total hours in day? If you too have 24, then 24-18=6hrs. In those six hours, you want me to eat well and be fit too. Not to mention manage my home, relationships and life. So, how many hours of sleep do recommend? Two?
Working hard is indeed important in your twenties (arguably it is important all your life). However, what are you working hard towards? Are you working hard towards your own comprehensive life goals? Life is made up of not just career, but health and relationships too. Health includes enough, good sleep, along with exercise and nutrition. Relationships means spending time with friends, family and significant others. Hence, work backwards from 24 hours to calculate the time you have for work. Take out fitness, sleep, eating and relationships and it is hard to get more than 10-12 hours of work time per day on an average, even for a super hard worker.
However, that time is enough, if you work with full concentration and involvement. Human beings neither work 18-hours a day nor do they need to. In fact, for most people it is tough to do more than six to eight hours of really focused work per day.
So yes, work hard, damn hard, but within confines and capabilities of the human body and brain.
Even as 18-hour workdays don’t work, Quiet Quitting doesn’t either and it won’t serve you in the long-term. If you feel like quiet-quitting, it is a sign of something else. It probably means you don’t like your work or environment or colleagues. The answer to that is not to quiet quit. A better solution to that is to do Quiet Work to change your life situation instead. Quiet Work means work that you do only for yourself – to further your career and life. It could mean looking for a new job, networking, studying something else, making a business plan or whatever it take you to get out of the mess of your current job. It could mean finally paying attention to your fitness, because you want to, and not because someone expects you too.
Quiet Work means you quietly work to change the situation for yourself, but nobody else around you figures that out. Because you still do your current work well too. You may hate your current job, but you still do it well, because deep down you know that this temporary. For you are doing the Quiet Work on the side to change things for yourself. Sometimes in life, we are stuck in situations we hate. As human beings, we need to have the resilience to survive that phase well, while still doing the Quiet Work to get out of it. Spoiling your name at work by quiet quitting, checking out of work, and in a way checking out of life is not the answer. Sometimes, job or even life may suck, but the way out of that situation is not to Quiet Quit, but to do the Quiet Work to make life better for yourself, while still doing what you need to do well. That’s what ultimately leads to success, or shall we call it, Quiet Success.