Some jobs are proactive: you have to be the one doing the calls and you have to make the work yourself and no matter how much you do you’re always expected to carry on making more, you’re never finished. Some jobs are reactive: The work comes in, you do it, then you wait for more work and repeat.
Proactive roles are things like business development/sales, writing a book, marketing and advertising, and research. You can almost always do more, and there isn’t really an end point unless you want to impose an arbitrary end point: I’ll stop when I finish writing this chapter, or I’ll take a break after this research paper. I imagine[1] that a type of stress present in sales and business development is that you are always pushing for more, like the difference between someone who wants to accumulate $950,000 dollars for retirement as opposed to someone who simply wants lots of dollars for retirement.
Reactive roles are things like running payroll, being the cook in a restaurant (or being the waiter in a restaurant), legal counsel, office manager, teacher. There is an ‘inflow’ of tasks or work or customers, and you respond to that inflow. But if there are times when there isn’t any inflow, then you just wait for work to arrive[2]. After you finish running payroll for this pay period, it isn’t like you can take initiative to send the next round of salary payments ahead of schedule. Or imagine being the cook in a restaurant, and there is a 30-minute period when there are no new order placed. Once everything is clean and you are ready for orders to come in, what can you do? You prep what you can, and then you just kind of… wait for more work tasks to arrive.
It isn’t always so simplistic of course. Maybe the waiter has some other tasks on ‘standby’ for when there are no customer’s coming in. Maybe the payroll person has some lower priority tasks (back burner tasks) that are now the highest priority available task to do when there isn’t any payroll work to do. Often there are ways that you can do something other than sit around an twiddle your thumbs, and this is also a great way to get noticed and get positive attention from managers. But it seems to be a very slippery slope into busy work with a lot of low-prestige jobs: how often does that supply closet really need to be reorganized? How often does this glass door need to be cleaned? How many months in advance can you realistically really make lesson plans for the students?
Random musing from reading a reddit comment:
Some jobs are proactive: you have to be the one doing the calls and you have to make the work yourself and no matter how much you do you’re always expected to carry on making more, you’re never finished. Some jobs are reactive: The work comes in, you do it, then you wait for more work and repeat.
Proactive roles are things like business development/sales, writing a book, marketing and advertising, and research. You can almost always do more, and there isn’t really an end point unless you want to impose an arbitrary end point: I’ll stop when I finish writing this chapter, or I’ll take a break after this research paper. I imagine[1] that a type of stress present in sales and business development is that you are always pushing for more, like the difference between someone who wants to accumulate $950,000 dollars for retirement as opposed to someone who simply wants lots of dollars for retirement.
Reactive roles are things like running payroll, being the cook in a restaurant (or being the waiter in a restaurant), legal counsel, office manager, teacher. There is an ‘inflow’ of tasks or work or customers, and you respond to that inflow. But if there are times when there isn’t any inflow, then you just wait for work to arrive[2]. After you finish running payroll for this pay period, it isn’t like you can take initiative to send the next round of salary payments ahead of schedule. Or imagine being the cook in a restaurant, and there is a 30-minute period when there are no new order placed. Once everything is clean and you are ready for orders to come in, what can you do? You prep what you can, and then you just kind of… wait for more work tasks to arrive.
I’ve never worked in sales and I don’t think I’ve ever even had conversations about it, so I am really just guessing here.
It isn’t always so simplistic of course. Maybe the waiter has some other tasks on ‘standby’ for when there are no customer’s coming in. Maybe the payroll person has some lower priority tasks (back burner tasks) that are now the highest priority available task to do when there isn’t any payroll work to do. Often there are ways that you can do something other than sit around an twiddle your thumbs, and this is also a great way to get noticed and get positive attention from managers. But it seems to be a very slippery slope into busy work with a lot of low-prestige jobs: how often does that supply closet really need to be reorganized? How often does this glass door need to be cleaned? How many months in advance can you realistically really make lesson plans for the students?