Your Next Big Move Should Scare You

Melissa Ben-Ishay was scared when she walked into the first commercial kitchen for baking her cupcakes. She was scared when a publisher proposed she write a cookbook. And she was terrified when the board of Baked by Melissa, the company that bears her name but had long been run by more-experienced executives, offered her the CEO role in 2019.

“It was nauseating and emotional, like in my throat,” she says. She put the “Rocky” theme on her headphones. She considered her blind spots, like her lack of finance knowledge. But she didn’t say no.

“That’s just not an option,” she says. “You have to do the things that are scary.”

Big moments and decisions in our lives can make our stomachs drop. Moving somewhere new, getting married, starting a family—if we’re sizing them up realistically, maybe we should be nervous. (Newborns are exhausting; being a manager is hard.) More than half of workers in a recent poll ranked starting a new job as scarier than skydiving or holding a snake.

Just trust your gut, everyone implores when you’re staring down a new opportunity. It takes effort to distinguish between normal jitters and the kind of fear that’s a real warning sign, though. And it’s more work still to convince yourself to just do it, even if you’re doing it scared.

First, take a breath, advises Luana Marques, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of a coming book about harnessing anxiety. Calm your nerves by meditating, taking a walk or talking to a friend. Then, with clearer eyes, ask yourself: If I said yes, would taking on the discomfort of a new thing get me closer to where I want to be in my career or relationships?

Often, the fear cloaking our big decisions is “an anxiety toward your dream life,” Marques says.

The tough parts

For years, when Jessica Lapp thought about having a baby, she mostly felt freaked out. The wedding photographer, now 29 years old, would scroll through motherhood accounts on Instagram, where new moms lamented having no time to sleep, exercise or shower.

“Why would you sign up for this?” she recalls thinking.

Still, she could envision having a family with her husband. She began to poke at her fear. Was she focusing on the short-term trials of having a baby and losing sight of the long-term joys of having a child?

Fear can even be helpful, she realised, steeling oneself for the tough parts: the colicky baby, the loneliness of those early months.

“It’s the best decision I ever made,” she told me from her home near Charlottesville, Va., while her 1-year-old, Evelyn, napped.

It’s human to overcomplicate the moments that matter, and that’s OK, says Oded Netzer, a Columbia Business School professor who studies the use of data in decision-making. Research from Netzer and co-authors finds that, when faced with a clear but important choice, we start weighing factors that don’t really matter to us, such as the layout of a potential new office or lunch options at the school your kid would attend if you moved. Doing that makes the decision harder for ourselves, but it matches the gravity of the situation.

Spiralling into our fear, he says, ultimately makes us more confident in our call because we’ve done our due diligence instead of blindly trusting our intuition.

Comfortable, miserable

Not choosing is making a choice, too. Many clients who come to Tega Edwin, a St. Louis-based career counsellor, have stayed in bad jobs for years, terrified they’ll fail or be equally miserable elsewhere. And sure, they might.

Avoiding the unknown, Edwin tells them, guarantees a bad outcome: the job you already know you hate.

“I’m going to be in the exact same circumstance and nothing would change,” Danny Thompson, a software engineer in the Dallas area, says he figured when sizing up whether to try martial arts classes.

After gaining pandemic pounds, he was nervous to don the tight shirts required for jiu jitsu, afraid to be out of breath. Yet he knew there was no way his health would improve if he didn’t go.

“Fifteen seconds in, I was exhausted,” he said of the first lesson. Slowly, he got better. He participated in his first competition this winter, still scared, and placed second in his weight class.

Danger ahead

Sometimes you shouldn’t trudge ahead. Anne Mamaghani, a user-experience consultant in San Jose, Calif., felt torn when a recruiter presented a job opportunity that would have brought her near family in Indiana, exposed her to a new industry and boosted her title. The thought of wresting her two children, ages 10 and 13, from their school and community felt awful, though.

The stakes seemed too high to simply forge on, as she’d done in other situations. After all, it was her family members who would pay the price for a wrong call. After a couple of weeks of considering, she told the recruiter no thanks.

Learning to navigate change can be like building a muscle. When Mark Smith moved to Toronto from Salt Lake City a few years ago with his family, panic hit him on the first day of his new job.

“I just started thinking, what have I done?” he says. It took anti anxiety medication, a visit from friends and several months before he felt confident in his new life. That time abroad did bring him closer to his wife and son, he says, and proved his own resilience.

Smith jumped at the chance when the family had an opportunity to move to Italy last year. This time, he says he felt no fear at all.

“A good life,” he says, “requires a few risks.”

What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.

Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.

Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.

We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.

Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.

A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.

However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.

So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.

Be meticulous about your calendar

Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.

Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.

Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.

Hit the activity sweet spot, around 80%

Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.

No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)

Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.

This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.

“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.

Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.

And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.

Get physical

So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.

There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.

Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.

“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”

Use AI, but not too much

Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.

“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.

In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.

This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.

Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.

Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.