Is Work Addiction Hurting Your Career?

High or Low Bottom Line –

November 28, 2020 – “They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.” —Aldous Huxley. The end result of these differing work styles may look the same from the outside—an unbalanced life dominated by long hours at the office—but each face expresses a different set of emotional vulnerabilities. The broad umbrella of work addiction is only a starting point. If you’re a relentless or dyed-in-the-wool work addict, you’re distinguished by high work initiation and high work completion.

You work compulsively and constantly day and night, holidays and weekends, regardless of the deadline. You’re a hard-driving perfectionist, your work is thorough, and your standards practically unreachable. When you approach a project with a six-month deadline as if it were tomorrow, you get an adrenaline charge. Getting the project finished early leaves extra time to focus on other job tasks. Your focus is constant initiation of tasks and completing them at all costs. If you’re a bulimic workaholic, you have out-of-control work habits that alternate between binges and purges and are distinguished by low work initiation and high work completion. If you’re an attention-deficit work addict (ADW), you’re distinguished by high work initiation but low work completion. You’re adrenaline seeking, easily bored and distracted, constantly after stimulation. Your appetite for excitement, crisis, and intense stimulation is a strategy you unwittingly use to focus on a task. You like risky jobs, recreation and living on the edge because it gives you an adrenaline charge that helps you focus at work or play. Creating tight deadlines, keeping many balls in the air and taking risks at work make it difficult for you to slow down and relax. If you’re a savoring work addict, you’re the opposite of the ADW—slow, deliberate and methodical. You’re distinguished by low work initiation and low work completion.

You’re a consummate perfectionist, terrified deep down that the finished project is never good enough. You have difficulty telling when something is incomplete or finished. You savor your work as an alcoholic would savor a shot of bourbon. You inadvertently prolong and create additional work when you’re almost finished with a task. You’re notorious for creating to-do lists that take longer to generate than completing the task.