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Let's not discourage focus with this quiet quitting talk
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Let's not discourage focus with this quiet quitting talk

Patrick Thornton
Aug 26, 2022
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Share this post
Let's not discourage focus with this quiet quitting talk
betterdesigned.substack.com

Quit quitting is the latest hot-take trend that news orgs and social media are discussing.

What is it? As best I can tell it is doing your job as you are told and nothing more. You don’t say yes to extra work or try to work nights and weekends. The theory is that if you aren’t always saying yes to more, more, more, you are actually silently quitting on your job.

But saying yes to more, more, more can be bad for you and your company — particularly product companies.

I’ve never worked somewhere where our main problem was that people weren’t working on enough stuff. It’s always the opposite. We have too many priorities, too many projects, too many OKRs and KPIs, too many things to throw in a sprint at the last moment.

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What most orgs lack is focus. Focus is what enables greatness. It is what enables us to push beyond what has ever been done before.

Do not create a culture where people are always saying yes to more ideas and work. Create a culture where people can focus on meeting customer and market needs. Sometimes, we do need to jump at a new idea or project, but the employees who always say yes may not be driving nearly as much value as you think, and in fact, maybe the ones that are causing your company to fall behind.

If you create a culture where saying no means you are “quiet quitting,” you are creating a culture where focus is not possible, and your teams and companies may bounce between one half-baked initiative after another.

“Focus is about saying no, and the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.” — Steve Jobs

Here is Steve Jobs right after his return to Apple discussing their need for focus. Apple had become very unfocused after he left, and Jobs eliminated products and teams. Apple was going to do less but better.

And they did. And they did.

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Let's not discourage focus with this quiet quitting talk
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