The Indicator from Planet Money

Episode•March 24, 2025•9 min

How specialization can lead to burn-out

Half of all workers are showing signs of burnout according to a survey of international workers. Burnout can come from feeling detached from your work's purpose, having too much work, or ... from specialization. Today on the show, we speak with Shigehiro Oishi, author of Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/740022/life-in-three-dimensions-by-shigehiro-oishi-phd/). Related episodes: Is endless vacation a scam? (Apple (https://open.spotify.com/episode/6NrgvlDKhqZBNEZNWbEHM4?si=5d238f8bf7ca4202) / Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/episode/6NrgvlDKhqZBNEZNWbEHM4?si=fd67aaca1d914c44)) Why we work so much (https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/24/426017148/episode-641-why-we-work-so-much) For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org (http://plus.npr.org/). Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez (https://www.npr.org/people/g-s1-26724/sierra-juarez). Music by Drop Electric (https://dropelectric.bandcamp.com/). Find us: TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/planetmoney/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/planetmoney), Newsletter (https://www.npr.org/newsletter/money). To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com (https://pcm.adswizz.com) for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices (https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices) NPR Privacy Policy (https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy)

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Transcript

0:00

Npr. Burnout is this huge issue in the workforce and obviously one of the biggest contributors to burnout is having too much work. Another large one is feeling detached from the work's purpose. But there may be another, less recognised force adding to burnout specialization. Shige Uishi is a psychology professor at the University of Chicago.

0:36

Specialization is great for your productivity, efficiency and perhaps profit, but there seems to be some psychological cost.

0:49

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods. Today on the show, could efficiency lead to burnout? We speak with a leading psychologist who is redefining what the good life means and how that could mean different decisions in the workplace or in your home projects. One in every second worker is showing signs of burnout. According to a report by Boston Consulting Group last year, psychologist Shige Oishi defines burnout as essentially running out of fuel.

1:22

You just do not have energy to perform what you are asked to do. You cannot just summon your willpower or anything. It's not there, it's just drained.

1:33

Shige thinks that the way companies have been more and more specialized could be contributing to this. Division of labour is at the heart of the industrial revolution, you know, splitting production up into smaller, repetitive tasks. Famously, the Ford Motor Company started making cars with workers only doing ever more granular tasks. One worker would thread nuts on a bolt all day and then another worker would tighten those nuts. This approach worked wonders for the company. But division of labour comes at a psychological cost.

2:07

Every day if you're doing the same thing, and even if it's a highly skilled, specialized work, it is not so interesting.

2:16

Now, this isn't a new idea. The founding father of economics, Adam Smith, wrote about the tensions between productivity and stimulation back when he wrote wealth of nations two and a half centuries ago. Adam Smith is best known for highlighting just how amazing, amazingly fruitful division of labor is. But even he acknowledges the downsides. Here's what he wrote.

2:39

The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for human creature to become.

2:49

Now, Shige is much more polite with his words, but he says that doing the same thing over and over can be at the expense of a good life. He defines a good life as having three components and the first two are happiness and meaning. Fairly self explanatory, Are you comfortable? And are you contributing to others? But Shige also emphasizes a third component, psychological richness.

3:15

Here we're talking about life experiences and interesting stories, adventure and curiosity.

3:22

Psychological richness can come from a sense of playfulness Exploration or doing a wide range of things in your job. And Shige has tested this out in the lab. In one experiment, he got teams of three people to build virtual motorcycles. One set of teams had to work as a group with their tasks split. This was the division of labour group. And in the other group, the team members would each build their own virtual motorcycles individually.

3:49

So we give them 10 minutes and then in terms of performance, boy, Adam Smith was right. The division of labor group on average assembled 60 motorcycle, right? Whereas the non division of labor, non specializing condition, they together essentially assemble only 15.

4:15

Oh wow. There's a huge win for division of labor.

4:18

Huge win. But we asked how happy are you about this task? How meaningful was this task? Then we ask how interesting or psychologically rich was this task? Surprisingly, in terms of happiness and meaning, there are no difference between these two conditions, but division of labor condition, they said the task was way less interesting, less psychologically rich, way more boring. Although they did well, they performed so much better than the other counterpart.

4:54

And while specialization is undoubtedly more productive in the short run, Shige says long run productivity is more questionable. Shige cites meta studies of professional athletes that suggests that narrowing one's focus too early could backfire.

5:11

Some people specialize swimming at age 6, while others don't specialize until later, right? Playing multiple sports and things like that. So when they looked at these like super elite athletes who would be more successful, the people who specialized early or late specialization people, and it turned out that junior level, it was always the earlier you started, the better they perform. But once it went to the Olympic level or major league level and those highest level in the world, then interestingly, those people who play multiple sports until later, they performed much better. So it looks like, you know, burnout is less common among those people who played around rather than those who are just so dedicated every day now, Shige

6:09

says many people with specialized jobs might enjoy them, like famous Japanese sushi master

6:15

chef Jiro Ono, who essentially did the same thing for like 50 years. But he still say, I hate holiday because just, I just can't wait. Get back to work.

6:28

Okay. He's got the opposite of burnout.

6:30

Yeah, totally opposite of burnout. Right. What's interesting is that he is the mischievous, playful person. So, you know, when he's serving sushi, he has, he has, you know, nice conversation with the customers. But also he has a lot of challenges because Tokyo Bay, what kind of fish you can catch is changing over time. He is constantly trying to improve his technique. For instance, he used to massage octopus for 30 minutes. And then he already had the three measuring star, but he realized, oh, maybe I should be massaging octopus for 45 minutes. So he changed to 45 minutes. So I think, you know, certainly one way to get psychological richness is from doing one thing again and again. But try to see some new thing in it.

7:22

Specialisation has taken over the working world. You can see it in factories, in coding, in delivery warehouses like Amazon's, and in scientific research teams. And now even home lives are becoming more specialized. Many families are choosing to work more in their day jobs and do less housework and cooking in favor of fast food and services like TaskRabbit. Shige sees this as a missed opportunity. He tells this story where he investigated how much it would cost to turn his messy side garden into a brick patio. It was going to be super expensive to pay a landscaping company to do it. So he and his wife decided to diy.

8:03

Oh, my gosh, what a torture that was.

8:06

You're not a trained landscaper.

8:07

Not at all. That was the first time carrying like 200 bugs of river, rocks and the sands. Literally. I thought I broke my back. And the worst part of course is like, you know, whose idea was this?

8:21

You.

8:21

Mine. No, you. Always constantly fighting with my wife. And it took like two, three months probably to finish. And of course, if you had paid, it would have been just like three, four days. It would have been a beautiful patio. But if we had hired somebody, would we be still talking about that experience? Of course not. Right. It has tremendous value, adds so much richness to your life. So it is wonderful memory.

8:50

Now, now what you take from that story is kind of in the eye of the beholder. Maybe that's a parable to say he should have taken the landscaping company. But, you know, there is the saying, you can either have a good time or a good story. Shige Uishi has a new book out called life in 3. How curiosity, exploration and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life. This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim with engineering by Neil Tivolt. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez Cake and Canon edits the show and the indicator is a production of npr.

How specialization can lead to burn-out

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