Try LARPing by pretending to work hard
If you think working hard is the best way to get ahead in your career, you’re right. But you’re mostly wrong. Working hard takes a lot of effort — effort that could be much better spent doing something that improves the world we live in. Yes, I’m talking about the hours you spend playing Wordle on company time.
Worse, expecting to get ahead because you work hard does not take into consideration that this strategy takes time. There you are — working away at a project with a delivery date two weeks in the future. No doubt, in 14 days, you will show up with your absolutely brilliant deliverable in hand.
Unfortunately, today, up on Mahogany Row, the next round of raises and promotions is being decided. By the time you finish your project, all the goodies will have been given out to a bunch of slackers who, while you were working, had spent their time LARPing.
Yes, LARPing. LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing.
You could describe LARPing as employee showboating, acting like you’re working hard even when you’re hardly working. Or so I learned in “LARPING Your Job,” an article by Anne Helen Petersen in “Culture Study.” As Petersen describes it, LARPing is “the way we try and show evidence that ‘Look, over here, I am working.’”
No question, LARPing is an essential part of any job, especially when the job does not involve producing widgets or whatnots, which can be counted. On an assembly line, the doorknob maker making more doorknobs than the doorknob maker next door makes is going to get promoted. That’s just the way it is in the dog-eat-dog world of doorknob makers.
The situation is entirely different if what you make isn’t doorknobs but decisions. No doubt there is a certain status to working with a computer instead of a wrench, but there is very little to count when you are a knowledge worker. (A better name might be “ignorance worker,” but why be snarky?)
Hourly workers have their own set of problems.
How can you count the hours it takes you to grind out a marketing manifesto or a slew of computer code? Yes, there are the billable hours you spend, slaving at the keyboard, but how about the hours spent slaving over a midday nap, preparing your brain for the brilliant insights that will come when you wake up, jot down some unintelligible gibberish and go back to sleep?
Clearly, what you need are sure-fire techniques for calling attention to the work you are doing, especially when you’re not really doing it. And, at the risk of doing a little LARPing myself, that’s where I can help.
No. 1: The Busted-Keyboard Maneuver
What better way to show you are pounding the computer than to bust your keyboard? It could take hours of hard typing to create a broken mass of random keys and chips, so I suggest you use a hammer. When your boss gets your frantic email, “Keybode bokken. IT contecked,” your reputation as a hard worker will be secured. (Bonus benefit: the weeks of leisure you will enjoy while waiting for the IT department to get you a new keyboard.)
No. 2: The Big Swoon A well-executed fainting spell is an excellent way to show that you’ve been working too hard. The strategy is most effective when you are in the office, but remote workers can achieve the same result. Your colleagues on Zoom will be concerned and impressed when you sigh loudly, slowly slip off your chair in a balletic glissade and sink beneath the bottom of the screen. It’s a move best augmented by the sound of a watermelon being squished from your favorite Gallagher video. No. 3: The Burnout Burn It doesn’t take acting skill to convince your managers that you are working too hard. According to the Mayo Clinic, symptoms include being cynical or critical at work; becoming irritable or impatient with co-workers; and feeling disillusioned about your job. Hey, that pretty much describes you on Day One.
No. 4: The Friend-in-Need Technique
If you don’t want to mislead management, have someone else do it. Get a friend to call your boss to report that you’ve been working way too hard. The problem, they can say, is that “you care too much.”
Don’t have a friend who will spout such nonsense on your behalf? Get in touch. When it comes to making you out to be a burned-out basket case, I’m happy to help.
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at