The Hubble-Lemaître Effect at Work

On this Blue Tuesday, we may observe an awkward phenomenon at work. No matter how much we love our colleagues, our colleagues seem to drift away from us. If we consider our cubicle as an island and our manageable individual work as the perimeter of that island, we notice ‘our’ island doesn’t touch our colleagues’ islands. Due to the incredible employment costs, efficiency is essential and we will surely not have overlapping land to manage. On the contrary, there is a lot of sea between us, to be interpreted as a lot of work that is not covered by any colleague. Moreover, due to the multiplication of work, our islands seem to be drifting apart, with a risk of alienation from our colleagues.

Astronomers will recognise this. The resemblance with the Hubble-Lemaître effect is striking. The Hubble-Lemaître effect describes the observation that the celestial bodies around us show a red Doppler shift proportional to their distance from us. The conclusion was that all celestial bodies are therefore moving away from each other and the universe must be expanding. Replace ‘celestial bodies’ by ‘colleagues’ and ‘distance’ by amount of work lying between you and your colleague, and you get the point. No matter how hard we work, the amount of work ‘not done’ is always getting larger and we are not getting closer to our colleagues, on the contrary. There is always more work coming in. No matter how many colleagues we can recruit to fill the gaps, work between us multiplies faster than we can execute it. We see our dear colleagues drifting away from us and they may observe the same phenomenon.

The redshift observed may be an analogy to the red cheeks we show by leaving so much work undone. If our colleagues are a bit shameless and pay only attention to our personal shortcomings, our relationships may deteriorate and we may even become disconnected workers.

The solution to the Hubble-Lemaître effect at work is halting the multiplication of work. Throw at least 50% of new actions into the oblivion pit! Looking back in the past, you will notice a lot of actions never led to any progress. I agree we don’t always know this in advance. We could have guessed, however. We should create new actions with a sense of responsibility. Actions which simplify should be preferred over actions which make life more complex. In the long term, there is more work disappearing through sound oblivion than through proper execution.

Last year on Blue Tuesday, we discussed the Yerkes - Dodson Law.

Image by Rizve Joarder from Pixabay