The word of the month for June is NPT, which stands for “non-promotable task.”

I have just finished reading The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work (2022), by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart. The starting point of the book is a group of women who start meeting to talk through how utterly and completely swamped by work they’ve become. They are so busy that they cannot find time to make progress on higher-priority projects, not to mention time for themselves and their personal lives. So they start a “No Club,” a support group that provides them the space to talk through their unmanageable schedules and develop strategies for when and how to say no.

There’s much to learn from this book. Allow me to convey here one of the key distinctions the authors make: promotable tasks versus non-promotable tasks.

• Promotable tasks are the kinds of things that most directly lead to your advancement in your field and/or organization. They are visible, they require specialized skills, and they “are instrumental to increasing the organization’s currency.” For academics, publishing is an example of a promotable task.
• Non-promotable tasks (NPTs) are the kinds of things that may help your organization and others but do not advance your career. Examples include helping others with their work; filling in for people who are absent; organizing and coordinating the work of others; editing and proofreading; planning events; serving on committees; recruiting, onboarding, training, mentoring; helping coworkers with personal problems; helping coworkers work through conflicts; and “office housework” kinds of activities, like party planning.

As you can see, NPTs can be incredibly beneficial to the organization, and as part of the organization, we all should take on some of this labor. The problem is that some people (the authors focus on women while recognizing that the problem may be experienced more widely) are taking on much more of this labor than others. The people taking on the labor, who often feel like they have to do it (in fact, they are often the first ones asked), have less time for their promotable tasks. Those who do not take on the labor have that extra time for their own promotable tasks, and the authors provide many infuriating examples of some people who are promoted over other people at least in part because they were shouldering fewer NPTs.

And of course, sometimes a task will start out as promotable and then, over time, become an NPT.  Or sometimes an NPT will be the kind of thing that you want to do because you like doing that sort of thing or because you perceive some other kind of benefit. The idea is not for us to avoid NPTs at all costs, but instead to become more mindful and selective when it comes to deciding how we spend our time.

I chose this word for June because I suspect that many in the ADR community find themselves overextended. ADR people tend to be good at many different kinds of tasks, and this abundance of talent combined with the desire to help may make ADR types more vulnerable to overload and burnout. The summer is an opportunity to rethink and reprioritize!

Along these lines, the authors recommend forming No Clubs to help talk through what’s important and what’s not (and how to say “no”) with colleagues in similar positions. If anyone wants to form a No Club, let me know! In addition to becoming more proficient at task management, it would be great to talk more about career paths and professional development.