More complicated than the category of Things—which involves simply withholding your fucks from inanimate objects/concepts/activities—Work is still not quite as fraught as dealing with friends and family, thus making it the logical second point of entry to getting this life-changing magic under way.
Additionally, if you ask a bunch of random people what they hate most in life, lots of them are going to say their jobs, bosses, coworkers, IT departments, or something in that realm. Kind of a wide target.
Luckily, there are plenty of perfectly acceptable ways to reduce the number of fucks you give at work—whether it’s bailing on an unnecessary meeting, eschewing useless paperwork, or declining an invitation to a coworker’s party—and still continue to remain employed, respected, and even well liked (if you give a fuck about that; see here, “The Likability Vortex”). We’ll discuss many of them in depth in this section and even more in part III.
The two most common reasons you give too many fucks when it comes to work are:
1. Fearing the judgment of a boss (who controls your access to a paycheck)
2. Fearing the judgment of coworkers (with whom you spend the majority of your day).
This is all perfectly understandable on the surface, but have you ever really stopped to consider:
1. How hard it is to actually get fired if you’re doing a decent job?
2. How little you really care, deep down, whether Gail from Marketing thinks fondly of you? Fuck Gail and her Save the Polar Bears half-marathon fund-raising drive, am I right? (But more on Gail later.)
For now, remember that you should only give a fuck about things you can control, and no fucks about things you can’t. Work is a petri dish teeming nine-to-five with things, people, and practices that we did not actually choose for ourselves and therefore cannot control.
Consider the average office building and its depressing industrial carpeting, bland conference rooms, and fake potted plants. You could let that soul-destroying tableau get you down, or… you could stop giving a fuck. Instead of walking in every day and thinking, God, this place is a shithole in gray scale, I’m so depressed, you could think, At least I don’t have to worry about spilling coffee on this carpet; it can’t get any uglier!
The point is, you can only control how WELL you do your job, and how MUCH time and energy you put into it to minimize annoy and maximize joy.
Applying the NotSorry Method to your working life and giving zero (or at least fewer) fucks to the aspects of your job that annoy can be surprisingly simple—and it does not have to result in your getting fired for incompetency or insubordination.
To get you in the right frame of mind, let’s go over a few common examples of things you may or may not give a fuck about when it comes to a day’s work:
I’m not saying you necessarily can or should completely stop attending already scheduled meetings, especially if attendance is crucial to job retention. (Assuming you want to retain your job. If not, please see “The Ultimate No-Fucks-Given to Work” here.)
But there are meetings you do not have to agree to attend in the first place.
For example, say a colleague from another part of the company—the Chicago office, perhaps, if you work in San Diego—is coming to town. Some executive assistant is “setting up meetings” wherein this colleague wanders around making the same small talk about the weather and delivering vague commentary on the state of the business in half-hour increments with everyone on your floor. There are eight meeting slots, says the executive assistant. Which one do you want?
Answer: None of them.
You can just say “None of those times work for me” and continue on with your day. I know, you’re worried you’ll get in trouble, and your desire to stay on your boss’s good side overrides your desire not to take this meeting. But if you’re a competent employee and you know it’s a pointless use of a half hour, your boss knows that too. Decide you don’t give a fuck. Let someone else take one for the team. There are plenty of unenlightened coworkers who will march toward those slots like blindfolded prisoners to a firing squad. It doesn’t have to be you!
(Better yet, if you have one of those e-calendars that’s viewable to everyone in the office, just start marking entire days “busy” so nobody can schedule a meeting with you.)
Sure, some meetings are required. No way around them. But if you find those meetings to be black holes of useless chatter, not to mention a total fucking waste of your time, you could decide to not give a fuck about paying attention. And you can most certainly stop giving a fuck about taking notes. Seriously, have you ever used the notes you took in a meeting? Let’s be real.
And once you’ve decided to stop giving a fuck about walking away from the weekly Sales Department circle jerk with a page full of meaningless doodles, you can use that time to do something you do give a fuck about. Such as making a grocery list. Or planning your next birding adventure (those lesser prairie chickens won’t spot themselves). Or writing the Great American Novel! Just think about how much you could accomplish—stuff that you actually give a fuck about—in those currently wasted, say, one to five hours a week. That’s fifty-two to two hundred and sixty hours a YEAR.
Yeah, I thought you’d get fired up about that.
Conference calls are basically a subset of meetings. They are meetings held over the phone. They are worse than meetings. They are the perfect storm of nonproductivity: an excuse to get absolutely nothing accomplished and waste literally everyone’s time. Whenever possible, I refuse to engage in conference calls, and I assure you I have remained a respected, productive, and employable human being.
I’m not exaggerating for effect here—I simply will not participate in a conference call that I deem nonessential. Once I started saying no to conference calls, it was effectively like saying yes to three or four unencumbered hours per week in which I could get actual work done. You can decide not to give a fuck about a conference call. NOTHING OF SUBSTANCE WILL OCCUR ON IT ANYWAY. This is the nature, and paradox, of conference calls. If people persist in trying to schedule around you, make it really difficult for them and they’ll give up soon enough. Seriously, if there’s anything I hate more than being on a conference call, it’s trying to schedule one.
And if you’re worried about being a bad colleague or employee, ask yourself, Does my not giving a fuck about being on this conference call affect other people? The answer is obviously yes, but it actually affects them in a positive way. You’re saving people from themselves if you gently guide them—not just yourself—away from engaging in this time-, energy-, and soul-sucking activity. Their metaphorical wallets will positively swell with extra fuck bucks!
This may or may not belong on your list depending on the kind of company you work for. Obviously if you are a freelance writer, like me, you stopped giving a fuck about pants a long time ago. If you work for some fancy hedge fund or law firm or what have you, you probably have to wear a suit, no getting around it. That goes on the fucks-given list—although there’s always an insouciant pocket square to increase joy. If you work retail or food service and there’s a uniform, just skip this section. And if you work at an art gallery: Score! You get to do whatever the fuck you want.
But if you are one of the millions of people who work for a company that grants you permission to dress yourself each morning yet still feels the need to impose a “dress code” in the employee manual, get ready for some real talk.
My former company was very exacting about what constituted appropriate “Summer Friday” apparel: no flip-flops or thong sandals, no shorts on men or short-shorts on women, no tank tops or other “beachwear,” and a few other no-no’s I’m too deep into my enlightened state to remember. There were memos every year; you could set your calendar by the CEO’s seasonal condemnation of bare toes. Maybe she was trying to keep it professional; maybe she suffered from podophobia. Either way, I eventually decided I didn’t give a fuck.
It happened like this: Every day when I was getting dressed to commute forty-five minutes to work during the oppressive fug of summer, only to spend eight-plus hours in my office and then usually hit up a work-related event in the evening before commuting the forty-five minutes back home, I really started to resent not being able to wear whatever the fuck I wanted. (And also, not to brag, but I have nice feet.) If I’m going to be on those feet twelve hours a day in the sweatiest months of the year, we’re talking blisters the size of poached eggs if I have to jam my stocking-free size 8s into a pair of ballet flats.
So one day in the summer of 2014, as I looked longingly at my closetful of fancy thong sandals in pretty colors that would go nicely with my work-appropriate capri pants, I just said a mental Fuck it and started wearing them to work.
I had spent a cumulative eight years at that company being pissed off and covered in Band-Aids from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and for what? Because I gave a fuck about the dress code! I’m getting riled up just thinking about it.
Here is what happened: NOTHING.
I wore my sandals all summer and nobody said a goddamn word. I even ran into the CEO in the elevator multiple times and she didn’t bat an eye.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It is very hard to get fired from a job that you’re doing well. And given all the things you simply have to give a fuck about in order to actually do your job—there must be at least five that you could stop giving a fuck about and thereby significantly improve your day-to-day life. Dress codes are one of them.
This one applies to so many people across the working spectrum: lawyers, bankers, secretaries, retail managers—everyone up and down the chain of command. Useless paperwork is a scourge on our society and it’s up to YOU to stop giving a fuck!
Ever heard of the Broken Windows theory? Essentially, it suggests that if small infractions (like littering and vandalism) are allowed to stand, soon enough the entire environment will fall victim to larger-scale destruction.
And so it is with paperwork.
We have got to nip this shit in the bud. The more useless paperwork you acquiesce to doing, the more you’ll have heaped upon you. It’s, like, Newton’s Fourth Law or something.
Yes, there is some paperwork you just have to fill out. Nobody gets paid if the W-9s aren’t submitted. That’s useful! But I’m talking about reports that you know full well nobody ever reads. That get written up and then filed away, waiting for the Apocalypse to render them even more useless. Like, TPS reports from Office Space –level useless. I’m talking about forms that are meant to be “circulated” but that somehow never reach their intended final resting places and have to be resubmitted seven times. And even though these forms go missing on a regular basis, the company hasn’t gone out of business yet—so it stands to reason that paperwork like this is not exactly essential to operations, and you don’t have to keep being a slave to it!
We all have a few such forms in our lives. I suggest you stop filling them out and see what happens. Probably nothing.
Do you work in an office or other environment where your coworkers think it’s appropriate to solicit donations for their personal activities? I did, and the only good excuse for that is Girl Scout cookies. Anything beyond Tagalongs and Samoas is a fuck you do not need to give.
Imagine that Gail from Marketing (remember Gail?) is soliciting pledges for her half-marathon, the proceeds of which will go to a charity that is important to Gail, but not to you. Gail is saving the polar bears or something. You couldn’t give a flying fuck about polar bears. But you worry that not contributing to Gail’s little jog-a-thon will render you a spoilsport in the eyes of your colleagues and that every time you see Gail in the break room she’ll make an excuse to turn around and walk out rather than share oxygen with such a goddamn bear-hating cheapskate.
Now, ask yourself, Do I honestly give a fuck about what Gail (or anyone else) thinks about my willingness to support her charity? About her (or anyone’s) opinion of me?
If the answer is no—which it should be, if you’re taking this at all seriously—then proceed to ask yourself, Just for the record, do I give a fuck about polar bears? How about half-marathons?
If the answer to these follow-up questions is also no, then you’ve just added to your starter list of Work-Related Stuff I Do Not Give a Fuck About. Congratulations!
The next step—which we’ll get to in part III—is to politely (i.e., without hurting her feelings) decline to contribute to Gail’s pledge drive; thus you have stopped giving a fuck what Gail thinks, decided her fund-raiser is something you could not give a fuck about, and then not given that fuck.
But again, you don’t have to transform yourself from an overburdened fuck-giver into a jobless asshole/office pariah.
When I say you can stop giving a fuck about what your coworkers think, I mean that, although I don’t know them personally, you can probably get by with paying a lot less attention to their opinions about your life decisions.
As another example, let’s say one of your coworkers, Tim, is having a birthday party at a local karaoke bar. For whatever reason, you don’t want to go to Tim’s party, but it’s the kind of thing you feel pressured to attend—though it’ll cost you, in the form of a good night’s sleep, thirty dollars in watered-down margaritas, and/or your self-respect. Now, I’m not suggesting that you respond to such an invitation by laughing in Tim’s face, or by sending him an animated GIF of that bear from Ted shitting into a party hat. I’m merely saying that you could—politely—decline the invitation and the world would not end. You’d have crossed one fuck off your list, and you’d have a free night as a result.
Many folks that I talk to about not giving a fuck at work actually seem less concerned about hurting other people’s feelings and more concerned about hurting their own reputations. Yet this is precisely why the NotSorry Method is overly concerned with not hurting people’s feelings and not being an asshole. Both of those things contribute to your reputation as an employee, colleague, or boss.
The key here is preparation and finesse. You need to articulate your fucks to yourself—by touring your mental barn and making your lists and considering your Fuck Budget—before it comes to hurting anyone’s feelings in real time. Then, act accordingly.
If you decide, for example, that you don’t give a fuck about the annual company picnic, just… don’t go. They can’t fire you for that, and you can use those three hours to catch up on Downton Abbey or spend time with a loved one. (Oh, who are we kidding? Downton Abbey all the way.) It’s not like you have to call in a bomb threat to get the picnic canceled. Just offer your regrets in a timely fashion. Honestly? Nobody cares if you’re there anyway; you’re kind of standoffish.
As President Obama might say, “Let me be clear.” One of the things I always have given and always will give a fuck about when it comes to work—at an office job or as a self-employed ne’er-do-well—is my reputation. Budgeting my time and energy, honing my ability to focus and produce, and being respected along the way are all elements of maintaining a good reputation, which is tops on my list of Things I Do Give a Fuck About.
And if I have a reputation as someone who doesn’t do conference calls? Well, that’s something you should feel free to scrawl about me on the men’s-room wall, alongside my phone number. I don’t give a fuck. (But I do screen my calls.)
As I’ve said, the ideal list-making state is to be sitting on a hard floor, mentally touring your barn and slowly growing numb from the hips down as you experience Fuck Overload. However, I will make an exception for the Work category if this is a list you could be making during a meeting. Fuck you, meetings!
Keep in mind, Work comes with a number of subcategories, such as Bosses, Coworkers, Office Politics, Meetings, Memos, etc. And then Coworkers can include sub-subcategories, such as Feelings, Birthdays, and Sick Pets.
Imagine there’s a set of dented metal filing cabinets lining the walls of your barn. Yank out every drawer, one by one, and make a list of all the work-related fucks you find inside.
Then (and only then) you can move on to Category Three: Friends, Acquaintances, and Strangers.
As with hurricanes, the Four Categories of Potential Fuck-Giving get more treacherous with higher numerical designations. I have faith in your ability to withstand the onslaught, but if you’re nervous about moving forward into Category Three, just know that we’re talking about extremely practical stuff here.
Like, if you’ve ever sat on your couch fantasizing about how to get away with a last-minute no-show at your friend’s poetry slam, you should be really excited about moving on to the next category. It might be a little uncomfortable at first, but so is listening to The Iliad rapped over the theme music from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood while you’re desperate to relieve your bladder of the four glasses of warm pinot grigio you consumed just to make it that far.