Reading Notes: The Good Enough Job, Part 2

📚 My top highlights and insights

Burnout is no friend to your reading habits. Chronic stress makes it harder to focus on what we’re reading, harder to absorb new information, harder to think critically about its message, and harder to retain any of it long-term.

That’s where Reading Notes comes in. Think of this as Cliffs Notes for burnout — if you’re operating at a deficit of time and energy and don’t have it in you to process an entire book, I made the TL;DR version for you.

Earlier this year I was an advance reader for Simone Stolzoff’s debut book, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work. The book is an examination of how work has expanded like a gas to fill any space we let it, and offers ways for both individuals and companies to right-size the role work plays in our lives.

I interviewed Simone around the time of the book’s publication in the spring and shared the first half of my reading notes over the summer. Today I’m bringing you Part 2, the final installment of this book. Feel free to join the discussion in the comments.

Starting in January officially — although now, technically — Reading Notes will be a regular monthly column exclusively for paid subscribers. I already have a few books lined up for 2024, but I’d love to gauge your interest in the following titles:

• Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, from Someone Who's Been There, by Tara Schuster

• Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, by Ethan Kross

• Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close, by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

• Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, by Amelia and Emily Nagoski

• Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, by Anne Helen Petersen

Please vote for the one you’d like notes on most:

This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org. Purchases made through these links may earn me a small commission.

Chapter 5: Working Relationships

“Cultures that say their workplace is like a family are almost never to employees’ advantage,” [Alison] Green told me. “It often means that you’ll be expected to work for unreasonably long hours with an unreasonably high workload for unreasonably low pay, and that if you push back on any of those things, you’ll be told either explicitly or implicitly that you’re not being part of the family.”

• This is Alison Green who writes the popular and incredibly, deftly helpful Ask A Manager blog.

Regardless of whether a company’s employees or executives say they’re like a family, the sentiment can never be genuine. Families and businesses have fundamentally different goals. What companies generally mean when they say they’re like a family is that they look out for their employees. Familial relationships, however, are unconditional. At-will employment, by definition, is conditional. Loyalty to the business will always supersede loyalty to employees. What companies and families do share is a tricky power dynamic.

One study from Gallup found that people who had a best friend at work were seven times as likely to be engaged in their jobs as people who did not

• My own lived experience supports this, too! but also, being more engaged in the work culture makes you more likely to form those relationships.

a sense of workplace belonging leads to a 56 percent improvement in job performance, a 50 percent reduction in turnover risk, and a 75 percent decrease in employee sick days. But … Although employees with friends at the office tend to perform better, they also report being more emotionally exhausted and conflict-avoidant.

• My work best friends and I often spent time together outside of work hours/work settings, and often this meant we would talk about … work. When my husband’s work bestie comes over, work is also their main topic of conversation. And while I think hanging out outside of work is good, it makes it harder to mentally and emotionally disconnect from work issues when not working.

research from University of San Francisco psychologist Saera Khan found that in close-knit workplaces, employees are more likely to keep quiet about wrongdoing. … Participants were less likely to report the wrongdoing if the workplace was more like a family.

• Not exactly the “protections” we were looking for from a work “family”

When you see a group as a coherent unit—which is what a family is—it’s really very hard to break that unit, which is what you’re doing when you disclose wrongdoing,” Khan told me. “You are destroying the idea that this is a healthy, happy family that’s doing well.”