All Stars Guest Post by Steve: Making a career out of doing as little as possible

This is a guest post from Steve, aka the  Philofaxy King. He also maintains a personal blog here. 

For those of you that know me, you will realise that in the following article there is a good deal of humour, a lot of truth and a little bit of fiction, but I'm sure you will all recognise some of the behaviour of either yourself or your work colleagues. 

So how did I get to where I am now... sat by the side of my own swimming pool, sipping cool French white wine and not having to worry about my next annual review or promotion interview. 

Yes I've been through all of those things, but no more. I have seen others put themselves through hell and get no where, they would be passed by, by the guys that seemed to do very little on a daily basis, but they always seemed to come up smelling of roses come the annual review pay round or promotion round. Now some of that might have been being in the right place at the right time, but that doesn't account for some of the meteoric rises I have seen by some people. 

So do you attend meetings? No... hen you aren't going to get very far in some circles... for some their career is totally about attending meetings, life would end if they didn't. You will recognise the professional meeting attendees, they are the ones that have the big notebook, and neat hand writing. They seem to write non stop as if their life depended on it. They can recall minute facts about the meeting two months ago to a level of detail that will astound you, even down to the detail of the food that was ordered last time, because they are experts on the in-house hospitality menu as well. But I never did discover what they wrote about in their big notebooks and some how they seemed to avoid getting actions from the meeting being put against their name. 

The other skills of a professional meeting attendee is to know the ins and outs of how the computer projector works, which input you have to select when you connect your laptop to that dangling VGA lead that comes up through a hole in the table. They will also know the key combinations to use to switch your laptop from the built in display to output via the VGA output and if it's not them that is presenting, then they will go back to their notebook, and guess what... yep they will start writing away continuously all the way through your presentation.

When it comes to the questions at the end, you think you will have done very well answering the bosses questions fully... and then just when you think you have got away with it.... Mr Helpful will look at his notebook and then with those immortal words 'Just one last question.... ' Then when all the heads in the room were looking at him, he would strike that killer blow, that full toss over silly mid off with a good deal of leg spin... and you struggle through the most irrelevant question you have ever heard... but it's that that the boss remembers you for months later...

Good meetings are the ones where no decisions are made, apart from the date of the next meeting and you get out of organising the coffee and lunch for. 

Some of the worse meetings are the ones that seem to go on forever, the chairman who seems to want to go through every single paragraph of the minutes and rerun the whole meeting again before you get to the real agenda items and yes I’ve attended a few of these in my time!

If you are fortunate or unfortunate to be the person who is the meeting secretary, then your position is more powerful than that of the meeting chairman. It’s down to you as to what goes on the agenda, and which preset menu is chosen, so if you like chocolate gateaux or strawberries, you get to choose.

I used to hate taking the minutes of the meetings I attended, that is until I was shown how to be a successful minute recorder, I would pre-write the minutes of the meeting before the meeting had taken place, and then in the meeting all I had to do was amend what was written and put in names for actions. On several occasions I was able to email out the minutes of the meeting before people had managed to get back to their offices! It takes some practice to be able to get to that level I will admit, but it’s very satisfying to be able to do it.

So these people that seem to succeed against all the odds when it comes to annual reviews and promotions... how do they do it? Well from my experience they are salesman, but with no product to sell apart from themselves. They can craft an annual review report or statement to within a hairs breadth of it being total baloney. Now most people would be ashamed of writing such nonsense, and that is were they losing out. I used to see statements written by very good engineers and other employees that if that was what they had put on their application form, I wouldn't employ them.

The number of times I've questioned people about the things they have left out of their detailed job description or review and they have replied with ‘but that’s part of the job’ I could scream…. ‘Yes I know it is part of the job, but if you didn’t do it who would?’ So I would then sit with him or her for an hour or so and we would tease out every single responsibility and action they took independently to really sell themselves as a valuable employee of the organisation. They would leave me feeling a little battered and bruised, but their pride in themselves had definitely received a boost.

When it comes to looking at the detail of what you have done in the last year, this is were the notebook/diary comes in very useful because you can see exactly what you were doing on any particular day, who attended the meeting etc. Did you make the decision because someone else was absent or what. So there is some mileage in making notes at meetings, don’t let me put you off that idea.

The next level of the professional meeting attendee is a meeting away from your own building. The experts will know the train timetable or the Eurostar timetable off by heart. They will have it down to a fine art as to what deals are available at the hotels in the city where the meetings take place, notes of the restaurants.

It becomes almost like a second home to them. They also become experts in the expense claims system, using their own credit card to pay for fares and hotels and a credit card that earns them air miles in the process to.  The expert will have a personal contact at the car hire firm, they never get the standard car waiting for them in the car park, it’s always something a bit different, may be luxury or sporting.

So you can see there’s two ways of working, the easy way and the hard way, the easy way could be to sit back and watch the rest of the greasy pole climbers fight it out up the career ladder and they don’t mind who they put down in the fight.

Or there’s the hard honest way I suppose, just work hard and hope that someone recognises your talent and hard work.

Or is there a third way? Yes, there is, learn some of the tricks from the experts, but apply them along with your hard work to improve your chances come the annual review and getting your bosses' attention about the good work you have done through the year.

If you are a manager yourself, don’t hide the work of the next level up from your staff, invite them along to meetings with you so they can see what is discussed, they might have ideas that can contribute. It also gets them known to the people in the higher parts of the organisation too. Also learn to delegate tasks, work of a higher calibre might test your staff, but it will certainly help them and you when it comes to their annual review.

Most of all, try to enjoy your work, it’s not forever, honest. Cheers…


Thanks, Steve, for sharing your thoughts regarding the daily grind called work. I recognize many people in your article, past and present, that I have worked with and for in my variety of positions. My final words of advice: don't let the bastards get you down, trust no one, and put yourself first in your professional decision-making. If you don't, nobody else will. Thanks for reading!