🥁 The OffBeat #83: How to Work With Urgency When You're Exhausted

Three cues from music to keep the tempo up

This is The OffBeat, from jazz drummer, two-decade marketing leader, and mom of two Allison Stadd: music-inspired answers for your leadership challenges, like a music-inflected take on networking. Let’s make work a source of creativity, connection, and motivation again.

Every other edition of The OffBeat is a think piece structured like a jam session in jazz (naming the tune—a punchy idea; soloing—exploring different takes on a central theme; outro—a thought-provoking closer).

I was catching up with someone the other day who’s in a similar stage of life—40-ish, two young kids, working full-time outside the home in a demanding leadership role—who mentioned a friend of hers who’d made a huge career pivot from the corporate world to medical school. She’d taken a big leap of faith based on her passion and dreams. At age 40, that woman is now a hospital resident alongside late-twenties graduates, working 80-hour weeks packed with inpatient rotations, rounds, and on-call duties, for very little money compared to the corporate world.

My first reaction wasn’t “Damn, good for her!” or “That’s so inspiring” or “Wow, she must have great stories”; it was “SHE MUST BE SO TIRED.”

Truly, my gut-reaction response to “How are you?” these days is: 😴.

I’m literally tired—I naturally need 8+ hours of sleep a night and two kids under five and a full-time-plus job make that a challenge to achieve seven nights a week—and existentially tired.

I got to hear Radical Candor author Kim Scott speak recently and she said something I cannot stop thinking about:

“It’s the most difficult time in history to be a leader.”

Let that sink in for a sec. The most difficult time, ever, to be leading a team at work.

Leading right now is like conducting an orchestra where half the musicians are Zooming in from somewhere else with unreliable Wifi, the sheet music keeps changing at whim, and the audience thought they’d bought tickets to see a heavy metal band instead of a jazz performance.

We’ve got:

1. Information overload

Leaders today are drowning in data, opinions, and endless em dash discourse on LinkedIn. Making clear, confident decisions in an era of infinite options is exhausting.

2. “Work-work” balance

It’s not just work-life balance anymore. Leaders are juggling business priorities and the emotional labor of managing teams who (rightfully!) want fulfillment, flexibility, and fair compensation.

3. Generational mishmash

Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z all want different things from work. Some are determinedly climbing the ladder, some are questioning if the ladder should even exist, some are dangling from the ladder over an abyss. Leaders right now have to bridge the gap between “hustle hard” ←→ “work shouldn’t define us.”

4. Authenticity mandate

Your team and your customers expect you as a leader to take stands on sociopolitical issues.

• Can we say the word “diversity” any more?

• Is it OK to take the afternoon off to volunteer or participate in a march, or do we have to pretend we’re at a doctor’s appointment?

• When coworkers ask “How’s it going?” at the beginning of a call are we just going to ignore the fact that Kanye West is selling swastika t-shirts and our kids’ schools are being raided by ICE?

And yet, every stance risks alienating someone. The line between ethical authenticity and performative action is needle-narrow.

5. Unlearning old rules

How to manage, how to market, how to grow a business—none of that really works the same way anymore. The best leaders are making it up as they go, which can be exhilarating but also so, so deeply exhausting.

Leadership now requires agility, empathy, and endurance like never before. There’s a cool silver lining, which is the chance to be more than a boss; to be a culture shaper, problem solver, storyteller. We need to embrace the mess in order to thrive.

BUT.

That doesn’t take away from the fact that we’re tired. Oh, so tired.

How do we muster the wherewithal to make great work, let alone motivate our teams and peers to work with urgency?

How do we meet deadlines, keep things on track, and power through our Hydra-esque to-do lists when it hurts so much to hustle?

You know what I’m going to say: music provides a helpful reframe.

Three takes:

Reframe work as “playing”

You don’t “do” music, you play it.

As

Adam Grant

writes in Hidden Potential, “It’s not a coincidence that in music, the term for practice is play.”

The benefit of thinking of your work, and leadership, as music-style “playing” is that it’s not only about turning the daily grind into daily joy (although research shows bringing the concept of play into professional development improves performance and enjoyment); playing music is as much about focused dedication as it is about good times. The beauty is that, laced within the moments of heads-down discipline, is the possibility of the lively, dare I say fun, side of play.

🎬 ACTION: Look at your calendar and to-do list for the week ahead; for any meetings or tasks that make you feel worn out, can you reframe them as part of you “playing” your job?

Take a (literal) “break”

Breaks play a key role in music. A "break" is a short, intentional pause or brief section of silence within a piece. It creates emphasis, builds tension, or gives the listener a moment to breathe before the music picks up again.

In jazz specifically, a "break" can also refer to a solo or improv section, in which a single instrument plays while the rest of the band drops out.

In both cases, the break, ironically, adds a burst of energy to the piece. It’s not about being lazy, or not being able to handle all the things.

(In classical music, a break is literally called a “rest”; a period of silence where no notes are played, but it’s just as intentional as the notes themselves, creating space, contrast, and rhythm.)

Do you see where I’m going?

Take it from Rick Rubin in The Creative Act:

“It’s commonly thought that achieving artistic mastery means working tirelessly. This is true. But it’s only half of it. There may be benefit in taking breaks, in stepping away and returning at a later point. Whether when practicing your instrument or over the course of your life’s work, recovery at the opportune time will cause greater leaps in improvement.”

🎬 ACTION: Write a 5-minute break into your daily sheet music. Everyone, no matter your role, your workload, the size of your team, how many kids you have, the size of your unfolded laundry heap, or the state of your kitchen countertops, can take 5 minutes to themselves every single day. Go outside to feel the air on your face; touch paper; sit silently petting your dog. Your very tired self requires it.

Remember simple is a sign of musical talent

In How to Listen to Jazz,

Ted Gioia

writes:

“[W]hen the band’s rhythmic cohesion is floundering, each individual in the group is tempted to overplay. This is almost a matter of instinct. It’s no different from a second-rate basketball team: when they fail to operate together as a unit, individuals forget the plays, and everyone starts freelancing and going one-on-one. In a band as on the field of play, lots of activity is no substitute for skilled execution.”

Simplicity = talent. You don’t want to be the one on stage over-playing, trying too hard.

When your brain’s on overload, dial things back. Keep it simple. Reduce complexity, mono-task, don’t over-complicate.

And there’s actually a lot of juice to squeeze out of simplicity. In the book, Gioia recounts the story of New Orleans jazz pioneer Sidney Bechet giving jazz broadcaster Richard Hadlock a sax lesson in 1946:

“I’m going to give you one note today,” Bechet told his surprised pupil. “See how many ways you can play that note—growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. That’s how you express your feelings in this music. It’s like talking.”

🎬 ACTION: What’s one thing you can simplify today? Condense a deck you’re working on into 50% of the slides (or give your team that feedback); remove everything from your physical desktop besides your laptop; shorten a narrative email you’re drafting into three bullet points instead.

Related OffBeat reading:

Any time people ask how old my kids are, they tell me—without fail—“Oh boy, you’re still in it”; i.e. still immersed in the physical, all-hands-on all-the-time phase of parenting where there are still diapers and pouches and sleep regressions involved.

I don’t know what I don’t know (except what I know from nieces, nephews, neighbors, and plenty of friends with older kids) but I do know that WE ARE ALL, PARENTS OR NOT, STILL VERY MUCH IN IT. Whatever “it” means in your life, be it caretaking responsibilities, stretched finances, dreams deferred, or just being a human in the general hellscape of our sociopolitical environment these days, everything is on overdrive.

And meantime the work-show must go on, and it’s on leaders to stage-manage it all. Be easy on yourself and face the music.

Have a great week,

Allison

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