The Indicator from Planet Money - How specialization can lead to burn-out

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

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. Related episodes: Is endless vacation a scam? (Apple / Spotify) 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.Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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 recognized force adding to burnout, specialization. Shige Uishi is a psychology professor at the University of Chicago. Specialization is great for your productivity, efficiency and perhaps profit. But there seems to be some psychological cost.

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Daryan 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 Shigeiouishi defines burnout as essentially running out of fuel. You just do not have an 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. Shige thinks that the way companies have been more and more specialized could be contributing to this. Division of labor 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 labor comes at a psychological cost. Every day, if you're doing the same thing, and even if it's a highly skilled, specialized work, It is not so interesting. 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 amazingly fruitful division of labor is. But even he acknowledges the downsides. Here's what he wrote. 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. 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. Here we're talking about life experiences and interesting stories, adventure and curiosity. Psychological richness can come from a sense of playfulness,

exploration, or doing a wide range of things in your job. And Shiga 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. labor group. And in the other group, the team members would each build their own virtual

motorcycles individually. So we give them 10 minutes. And 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 ization condition, they together essentially assemble only 15. Oh, wow. There's a huge win for division of labor. Huge, huge win.

But we asked, how happy are you about this task? How meaningful was this task? And 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, oh, 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. And while specialization is undoubtedly more productive in the short run, Shige says long-run productivity is more questionable. Shege cites meta-studies of professional athletes that suggests, that narrowing ones focus too early could backfire? Some people specialize, you know, swimming at age six 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, you know, specialized early or late, you know, specialization people? And it turned out that junior level, it was always the early. year you started, the better, you know, they perform. But once it became, you know, went to the Olympic level or major league level and, you know, 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 says many people have specialized jobs might enjoy them, like famous Japanese sushi master chef Jiro Ono. Who essentially did the same thing for like 50 years. But he still say, I hate holiday because I just can't wait, get back to work. Okay, he's got the opposite of burnout. Yeah, totally opposite of burnout, right?

What's interesting is that he is the mischievous playful person. So, you know, when he is serving sushi, he has, you know, a 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 he already had the three Michelin's 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. Specialization 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. Chige 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. Oh my gosh.

What a torture that was. You're not a trained landscape at it. Not at all. That was the first time carrying like 200 bags of river rocks and the sand. Literally, I thought I broke my back. And the worst part, of course, is like, you know, whose idea was this? You? Mine?

No, you. It's 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 value. But if we had hire somebody, would we be still talking about that experience? Of course not, right? It has tremendous value.

Add so much richness to your life. So it is wonderful memory 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. Shiga Uishi has a new book art called Life in Three Dimensions, how curiosity, exploration, and experience make a fuller, better life. This episode was produced by Cooper Katzma Kim with engineering by Neil Tewolt.

It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Cake and Canon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.