For decades they have instilled in us that the work we do is what defines us as people. The culture of effort and determination has generated generations and generations dedicated body and soul to the work aspect. We already know everything about “work dignifies a person” or “the early bird…”.

However, new labor and social trends have been showing a change in this conception of the professional sphere and its weight in the lives of young employees. Phenomena such as the great resignation, the quiet quitting or the lazy girl jobs that we explained in La Vanguardia highlight this change of outlook.

“Having a job that you like is the first step towards labor exploitation,” journalist Sarah Jaffe, author of the book La feina no t’estimarà (Ara llibres), Catalan translation of Work won’t, said in an interview with this newspaper. love you back, the book with which he revolutionized (and continues to do so) the United States and the United Kingdom. In this volume, Ella Jaffe explains that passion for work leads us to unlimited work hours and maximum effort for recognition and perfection. Limiting the effort dedicated to work is necessary to maintain mental and physical health, and that is what the 85% rule that many voices have been explaining in recent years says.

“We would understand this 85% work rule perfectly if we were talking about our car. Wouldn’t it occur to us to put it to the limit of its benefits? We try not to push it to the maximum to preserve it better, to prevent it from breaking down, to use less gasoline… the true performance is not in the machine at 100%, but in much less. According to many studies, it is about performing at 85%,” explains Ismael Dorado, psychologist, professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the International University of Valencia, and member of the Board of Directors of the SEAS, the Spanish Society for the study of Anxiety and Stress.

According to Dorado, the rules of stress tell us that if we increase our performance to 100% “we push our resources to the limit and panic: diseases arise, overactivation of the body in physiological and mental terms, etc. Far from being more productive, we will be more unproductive, we will make more mistakes and we will concentrate less.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor at Stanford University, expressed himself in the same sense in the book Work is Killing Us. “Every year more people die from work stress than from common diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes or the flu. If you work more than eight hours a day, can’t spend time with your family, and answer emails late at night, then work is killing you. Every day more than 6,500 people die from causes related to work stress, and its consequences go beyond the type of job, age or hierarchy, they affect everyone.”

The 85% rule was tested in studies by Robert C. Wilson in 2019 at the University of Arizona, which were published in the journal Nature. The researchers measured the error rate in learning new tasks and set 85% effort as the moment of greatest clarity and ability to learn. According to Wilson, when you give or do 85% of the effort, that is the time when tasks are neither too easy nor too difficult. According to the study, a neural network learned from a human brain, and when the tasks exceeded 85% difficulty, the artificial intelligence imitated the brain, became demotivated and threw in the towel.

One of the theorists who also defends this 85% rule is Greg McKeown, a Stanford-graduated business strategist, speaker and author of the book Effortless: Make it Easier to do What Matters Most. He believes that pursuing 100% work performance is the cause of today’s burnout epidemic. He explains in the book that there is not much difference between giving a talk with 85% of the available slides, or making a decision with 85% of the possible information. That is, it is not about being lazy, but about not pushing ourselves to the limit.

According to Dorado, the first recommendation is to listen to our own body. “We live in a society in which, when the body no longer works, we make up for it with coffee, stimulating drinks or lack of sleep. Anything to get the engine to the max. We must listen to our body, and, secondly, plan the effort.” In this sense, postponing tasks brings us many problems, according to Dorado.

For the psychologist, a member of the SEAS, it is necessary to establish realistic milestones and work goals. “This way we can be more creative and more flexible.”

This article was originally published on RAC1.