Working hard, Hardly working

 

'This self-worth is the most important thing you can develop for yourself, that any of us can develop. And it can't wait until you reach your goals.’ – Grace Beverley

Grace Beverley’s self-help book illustrates how the 25-year-old was able to juggle her Oxford University degree, social media success and two new businesses but the brief self-care section shows that she admittedly hasn’t mastered mindfulness.

I first became aware of Grace through watching her University of Oxford vlogs on YouTube. Her channel at the time was named GraceFitUK as the original focus of her channel was to showcase her fitness journey. Her growing platform later expanded to include other content like travel vlogs and clothing hauls.

 When watching her videos, I sometimes felt she was overextending herself, trying to meet her university deadlines, working with brands, and travelling the world. With her channel now being renamed and revamped to highlight her growing businesses, Tala and Shreddy, you can’t go back and look at those videos for yourself nor would I advise relying on my spotty memory. But in her first book, Working hard, Hardly working, Grace provides some insight into her work process then and now.

On various occasions Grace admits, as I’d suspected, that her work ethic in the past wasn’t always healthy. That’s what, in part, motivated her to create this book which consists of two sections which (unequally) discuss being productive at work and practicing self-care.  

The first section, Working hard, offers advice on how to be productive, manage your time and adapt to the modern working world. She introduces various techniques such as deep work triggers, task batching and a newly structured to-do list to help readers achieve their best. And these are just the ones I personally found most useful. Each technique is accompanied by an article or scholarly text that Grace never takes at face value. Instead she shares her own personal understanding alongside the creators’ thoughts.

Throughout her debut, Grace makes it clear that everything she suggests won’t be suitable for everyone who reads her book, instead people should trial and incorporate the ideas they think they can apply to their work life. She constantly reinforces that it is the reader’s personal responsibility to make what they want a priority, to really spend time self-actualising and determining their path to future success. In our outrage culture driven online society it can often look like we find everything and anything to blame before ourselves. Grace, however, has no problem asking her reader to hold themselves accountable to themselves.

Grace also discusses the social media world that she was at one point so heavily intertwined with. She pushes back against ‘Announcement culture’, our need to announce what we are doing in order to get validation from people online. When reading this passage I couldn’t help but think of influencers who announce that they have something new and exciting coming out in a few months just for it to be a t-shirt or phone case that hundreds of other influencers have done before. Grace makes it clear that she isn’t exempt from this culture but uses her own experience to encourage against it.

She goes on to discuss posting the realities of life on social media, which has become for many just a highlight reel. To me there is not nothing inherently wrong with your social media pages being a highlight reel. Why should I have to look back at the time I was the saddest I’d ever been? Or show that to strangers online? The problem arises when people, notably influencers, are manufacturing these ‘highlight’ moments to present their lives as something more extravagant than they actually are, in turn, causing their followers to look down at their own lives.

Early on Grace mentions that she wants the book to appeal to everyone, avoiding the cycle of women writing books just for women. Firstly, I’m not sure how appealing her pastel-coloured book cover will be to male audiences. Secondly, while trying to appeal to everyone she makes suggestions that the majority won’t be able to do. She mentions delegating tasks multiple times as way to manage your workload, but realistically how many people can do that? Who can a uni student delegate their work to? Surely delegating your responsibilities in your new job will mean you won’t be there long? Delegating is definitely tool only accessible to the those at the top of their companies, like Grace.

But I would say generally Grace is self-aware, potentially hyper self-aware. Her privileges are something that I have constantly seen questioned online. How can a teenager just get a job at IBM? How is a 23-year-old able to start two businesses? She doesn’t go into detail about either but makes clear that not she knows not everyone will have access to her private school education, Oxford University degree or white privilege. Still, she encourages the reader to make her advice work for them, ignore what they don’t enjoy and even critique her, which based on the few GoodReads reviews I’ve skim read, they definitely do.

In the Hardly working section Grace reminds her reader to give themselves the necessary breaks from work to avoid burnout. To avoid this she advises scheduling your time off, learning the art of doing nothing and urges her reader to define what having it ‘all’ means for them.

But her valuable message lacks the academic support of the book’s first half. She talks at length about things that shouldn’t need more than a page or two. Even with her over explanations this section of the book is still noticeable shorter than the former. Maybe she wasn’t able to find something that truly talked about what she wanted to say, and in that case this section could be pivotal in our future understandings of mindfulness. Still, when put next to detailed first section on the modern working world, it suggests that Grace, like many, continues to put mindfulness on the backburner.

As someone who has not established themselves in the working world (and isn’t eager to) I can’t tell you if any her advice is going to work in the modern working world. As a university student, I have found timing myself doing tasks to be useful in helping me manage my time and that deep work triggers help ease the transition from procrastination to production. So overall, her productive advice is engaging and informed, but it is the in the self-care section where we all need a bit more.