The work around the work
We don't lack effort. A lot of it just goes into making work possible instead of doing it.
Anyone who has lived in Lagos knows a particular kind of tiredness. You leave the house before six, sit in traffic for two hours, and arrive at work already spent, with the actual day still ahead of you. The effort was real. It simply went into getting to the place where work could begin, and I have come to think of that as the work around the work. My belief is simple: our problem in Nigeria is not effort. We work extremely hard. The problem is how little of that effort turns into results, and the longer I look for the work around the work, the more of it I find.
What interests me is how we talk about that effort. We admire the person who leaves before sunrise and gets home after dark, and their perseverance deserves respect, but the conditions that demand it deserve much less. We tend to glorify suffering, as though something is not worth much unless someone toiled for it, and so we praise the person who endured the painful process instead of asking why it had to be painful at all. I don't think long hours are a badge of honour. I think a normal working day should be enough to do a good job, and when it isn't, the first question should be what is wrong with the system, not how much more the person can give.
I say this as someone who has been quietly proud of a late night or two. The admiration is in me as well.
The pattern is not limited to commuting. I have used an analogy for years, and I want to be clear that it is an analogy, not a statistic: a cow here gives one bottle of milk while the same cow elsewhere gives a hundred. A more concrete picture is an artisan tiling a floor with hand tools and far more people than the job should need, still working hours after a crew with the right equipment would have gone home. Nobody in that picture is lazy. The effort is enormous, and the output is a fraction of what it could be. Nigerians are among the most industrious people I know, which is exactly why the gap between our effort and our results bothers me as much as it does.
Inside organisations, the same thing shows up in quieter forms. Most jobs contain two kinds of effort, the first going into the work itself and the second into making that work possible: finding information, chasing approvals, working out who owns what, reconciling two versions of the same file, and following up on the follow up. Some of the second kind is unavoidable, because work involves people and people need to coordinate. When it becomes most of the job, though, something has gone wrong, and in my experience it is rarely the people.
“I'm interested in how much effort it takes to make useful work possible.”
I should be honest about my own part in this. Every team I have been on has had someone who makes things work regardless, the person who knows where the file is, remembers who approved what, and stays late so the client never learns something broke. I have been that person, and it feels good to be needed. What I have learned, slowly, is that the person who keeps rescuing a process can make its weakness harder to see. If the work always gets done on time, nobody asks why it took so much, and the system looks fine because someone is quietly absorbing the cost. That someone has often been me, which means I have sometimes been propping up the very problem I say I want to solve.
The moment this became clear to me was not comfortable. A few years ago I was venting to a colleague about everything slowing my team down, the shifting priorities, the impossible deadlines, the expectations that didn't match the work. In my head I was defending our results. He listened, and then he asked me whose job it was to fix those problems. My head spun a little, because the honest answer was that it was mine. I had been describing the work around the work as if it were weather, something that happened to us, when it was really part of the job I had been given. The conversation changed from what was wrong to what we needed to do and what I needed approval for, and I have tried to keep it pointed in that direction since.
The answer is not to stop helping. It is to notice when I keep helping in the same place, because once I have rescued the same thing several times, it is no longer an emergency. Something about the way the work is set up is broken, and my job is to find out what. Asking that question changes what I look for. Sometimes the constraint is that nobody owns the task, and it needs an owner before it needs anything else. Sometimes people don't know what is expected of them, and a clear handover or a short checklist written where everyone can find it does more than a new tool. Sometimes the same information lives in four places, and the fix is to agree on one. And sometimes the most useful change is a removal, the form nobody reads or the approval nobody remembers asking for.
Software has its place, and I build it, but it should come after those questions rather than before them. When it does arrive, its job is to make the right way the easy way. A tool that adds a fifth place to check is not progress, however well it is built, and the same is true at a larger scale. The artisan does not need an app so much as better tools and the money to buy them, and the commuter does not need a productivity tip so much as a city that moves. What matters is finding the thing that is actually holding the work back, rather than reaching for whatever solution I happen to like.
Why am I sharing all of this? Because this is the productivity gap I want to spend my career on, and I would rather explain it from the inside than from a podium. I think about it at the level of a team, but I also think about it at the level of a country, where capable people spend their energy compensating for weak systems every single day. I don't want to make anyone busier. I want the same day of work to produce more, so that the farmer gets more from the same field, the artisan finishes the job in a fraction of the time, and the person in the office spends their energy on the work rather than on getting around it.
The change can start small, though. The next time something takes far longer than it should, it is worth resisting the urge to just push through and asking instead where the time actually went. In my experience the answer is rarely in the work itself, and almost always in the work around it, which is why I will leave you with the question I keep asking myself: what is the commute in your own work, the effort you spend every day just getting to the place where the real work can begin?