Learning to give it 85%

When you’ve been told to live a 100% have it all/do it all life

Those gold stars have a lot to answer for

All my life I was led to believe you had to give 100%. And even that was slacking. What was important wasn’t to win (yeah, right) but to try. To know in your heart of hearts that you’d given it your all. Plus a bit. What mattered, what always mattered, was the effort you put in. That was the mantra everywhere you looked: at home, at school, on children’s TV, in books and the media. The gold star for effort, was worth far more than the 10/10 for accuracy. (Although obviously I wanted both.) If I sound like a nauseating ginger freckly swot that’s because I’m pretty sure I was.

Gradually it became engrained that as long as I tried hard enough, anything was possible. (No thanks to the careers teacher who, when I was 14, told me that “girls like me” shouldn’t get ideas above their station when I foolishly voiced aloud my dearly held wish to write for Smash Hits magazine (or transcribe song lyrics, this was the early 80s kids).)

Consequently I gave it my all even when it was clearly to my own detriment. At comprehensive school, when to be seen to try was like putting a flashing sign on your head that said, punch me and then flush my head down the toilet just to be on the safe side. I did try to keep it low key, but those swot genes (or First Daughter Energy as poet Maggie Smith calls it), they run deep. At university, when I ricocheted on and off the tracks, because life (and we’ll say no more about it for this newsletter). At work, when, once I found my people in magazines, I confess, I became addicted to the dopamine hit of being really good at something and not having to pretend to be totally indifferent.

For a long time - decades - more effort equalled more success equalled more effort and so on. Every so often my body would say WTF? and take me out at the knees when it realised my brain had no off button (as I’ve written in more detail before), but by and large I’d learnt the lesson that giving everything you had and then some reaped “rewards”.

I once had a boss whose favourite phrase was “Best Necessary Quality”, one he used to justify cuts to a “product” (that’s a magazine to you and me) he deemed better than it needed to be. Too glossy, too beautiful, too many words, made with too much love. A lifelong member of the cult of over-delivering I despised his belief in strategic under delivery (to the readers not the bottom line, naturally). Best Necessary Quality. An 85% phrase if ever there was one.

100% was who I had spent my life being. I was so busy being 100% that I totally failed to notice my employers never gave me anywhere approaching 100% back… In fact, as the years have progressed, the percentage they give any employee has grown smaller and smaller.

I’ll never forget the time I changed jobs and announced to J that this time it would be different. This time it wouldn’t end in an emotional, physical or psychological crash. This job would be better, less crazy, less insane hours, less all-consuming, more manageable… Look (I somehow reasoned) it has less stuff on every page! More pictures! More ads! (I know, I know.) J gave me a look. If you know him IRL you’ll know the look I mean. And said, “Are you not planning to take yourself with you?”

At the time I laughed, brushed it off, even wheeled it out as a hilarious anecdote, but I didn’t really get it. Not REALLY. I was a 100% person - 110% in the parlance of the noughties. I wasn’t suddenly going to start giving it 85. Not even if my health depended on it. Which it did. Often.

Back then, I didn’t know how to. 

This is not a brag, humble or otherwise. More of a shame-faced admission.

It’s a product of being a certain type of kid from a certain type of background born at a certain time, the so-called meritocratic 70s/80s. A child of the evil witch Thatcher, who stole our milk (an admission: I hated that milk) and either gave your family the opportunity to buy their own homes or destroyed the council housing stock, or both, depending how you look at it. And plenty more besides. In short, it is a product of being a Gen-X woman who was told, yes, she could have it all and, for too long, believed it. We’re not called the do-it-all generation for nothing. And I’m saying this as a white, straight, able-bodied, childless woman living a middle class life who has never had to factor the nightmare of childcare and a partner who thinks the washing does itself, doesn’t know how to change a loo roll (or even where it lives) and thinks they deserve a medal for babysitting their own kids into the equation. (Which is why practically every conversation I have with a woman over the age of 40 ends up being about emotional and domestic labour. But. As usual I digress.)

All this is an immensely circuitous way of saying that when I saw this week’s headlines about Australian actor Hugh Jackman living by the 85:15 rule, my first response was that it must be a diet plan that had somehow escaped my notice (once a child of the 70s/80s…). My second was, 85%? What is he doing with the other 15%?

I know. I’m not proud. Not proud at all.

Of course, it took about two minutes for social media to divide along the lines of “boomer grafters” (side eye) v “snowflake millennials” v “this is all very well if you’re rich enough to have a choice” v “how dare you tell women they should be working less?” (I could have missed it and I’m sure you’ll enlighten me if I did, but in all the coverage I saw I don’t recall noticing any gender recommendations. Although I give it about five minutes before one of the right wing papers uses it as an excuse to suggest it wouldn’t be necessary if women knew their place and stayed in it…)

For some reason, the 2019 research from Arizona University that used machine learning to establish maximum employee productivity (the balance between risk taking and results, hard work and burnout) could be achieved at 85% capacity has resurfaced as “new research”. With Hugh Jackman as its face. Poor man. Go figure.

Suddenly venture capitalists and CEOs were bemoaning the fact that it’s impossible to work at 100% and achieve perfection. Presumably because everybody’s knackered. Yes, the very people who’ve been cracking the productivity whip in the service of profit for decades are now wondering if they might get more out of us if they flog us less. Oh how we laughed. Until we cried. Or were hospitalised.

But better late than never. I guess.

When you think about it, though, as I realise I have been since my most recent collapse/breakdown/burnout (pick your jargon according to your generation) around four years ago, whether you call it self-care or common sense or listening to your body when it screams STOP, giving 85% to your “paying” job (because this obviously doesn’t account for all the rest), is not exactly slacking off. It’s not bunking off to go dance in a field when your boss thinks you’re working from home (that’s more like 65%). It’s not even taking all your holiday allowance. It’s simply taking a modicum of time out to recalibrate. It could be, dare I suggest, doing things that back in the day used to be… contractual! Like actually having a coffee break. A lunch hour. Or even half hour. Clocking off on time-ish to go to the gym (or the pub or the PTA meeting). Finishing work early enough to have an evening. (Whatever one of those is.) A brain-clearing walk. Taking a day off sick when you are, y’know, sick. Or, shocker, bookending a weekend to spend time with family and friends. All things I struggled to do for the first, ooh, 53 years of my life without beating myself up afterwards (or before or during). All things I still feel vaguely uncomfortable about, if I’m honest, because once you learn to value yourself according to the gold stars life gives you, it’s a hard habit to break. 

But it’s a necessary one. I learnt that the hard way. I can’t honestly say I manage it. Not least because often when I consider I’m not working I’m almost definitely doing something work adjacent: reading a book (for work), listening to a podcast (for work), attending an event (and forensically analysing the chair for work) or back-to-back streaming something on Netflix (that I might use for work). You can take the girl out of the 80s, I guess, but it’s not so easy to take the 80s out of the girl. At best I’m a work in progress. 90% and creeping downwards, on a good day.

Earlier this week, as the 85% debate set light, I noticed a broadcaster canvassing Twitter (I can’t bring myself to call it X) for ideas of what to do with that precious 15%, then later bemoaning how uninspiring the suggestions were. It’s no surprise the broadcaster in question is a boomer/Gen-X cusp woman. God forbid you don’t use that 15% to learn a new language!