If your workplace insists that everything is a priority, vacation days are for the weak, and a moment not grinding out work is a moment wasted, then you’re likely living in hustle culture. Modern Mentor shares her advice on why—and how—to dial back the hustle.
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 like:
- What’s the outcome you need to achieve, and might there be a simpler path to achieving it?
- Has someone inside our company done something similar that we might use rather than reinventing the wheel?
- What do you suggest we deprioritize so that we have the time, space, and resources to do this project justice?
- What would be the cost of our not doing this project, or doing it in a month when we’ve freed up some resources?
These anti-hustle questions allow us to slow down, to consider the cost of doing—but also not doing—the work, and to recognize that our resources (which include our emotional and creative energy) are limited and we must spend them thoughtfully. Often they lead us to the same or better outcomes, but with less effort exerted.
My sobbing client agreed to give these a try. I’ll keep you posted on how they serve her.
2. Check on the people around you
Hustle cultures value results at all costs while anti-hustle prioritizes human wellness with an understanding that wellness is a driver of creativity and better results.
To drive an anti-hustle culture, stay in touch with people around you. See how everyone is doing. These are the moments in which your EQ (emotional quotient) really matters!
How are your colleagues or team members doing, really?
Make it a habit of just checking in with people around you. Focus on those whom you suspect may be dealing with loneliness or overwhelm; those who are new to the team and haven’t met anyone in person yet; or just those you’d just like to get to know a little better.
Your job isn’t to be anyone’s savior—loneliness and overwhelm aren’t yours to solve or cure. But just creating the space in which these concerns can be raised begins to dial back the hustle. The conversation helps normalize our complex human experiences.
Give people’s realities airtime, and watch them breathe just a tiny bit more deeply.
3. Tell stories of white-space wins
Hustle culture loves the grind, while anti-hustle appreciates the power of space in which the mind can roam and explore.
Hustle culture puts execution on a pedestal. Always be grinding, crushing, smashing… it’s a little violent when you start speaking its language!
But so often, the greatest insights—the moments of inspiration, creativity, innovation—come when we’re taking a pause from the grind.
There’s a great urban legend that goes like this: A senior executive was walking the halls of his tech company one day when he came across a man sitting at his desk just staring out the window.
When the executive asked that team’s leader why this gentleman hadn’t been fired, the team leader said “Sir, that’s the employee who developed the idea for our most profitable product of the decade.” The next day that employee came into work only to discover his window had been tripled in size overnight.
Did this really happen? I have no idea. But it’s a powerful story of what can happen when we give our minds the time and grace for wandering—letting connections happen in the space between the grinding and the crushing.
Small moments like this are happening in your workplace. Coffee dates, walking meetings, moments of silence or learning or reading or listening to podcasts… can all yield small ideas that improve customer service or tweak a product or alter an old process.
Proactively finding these moments—and highlighting them through stories—is an excellent way to dial back your hustle.
So how are you feeling about the state of the culture at your workplace? Do you have some hustling to do in dialing back that hustle culture? Give one of these suggestions a try. And if you’ve got your own ideas, I’d love to hear them. Shoot me an email at
[email protected] and let me know how you’ve managed to turn back the dial.