David Graeber defines “bullshit” jobs as “useless jobs that no one wants to talk about.” In fact, he makes a distinction between “shit jobs” and “bullshit jobs”.

“Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried… Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honour and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers - as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do.”

The table below has the original five categories from Graeber’s book. As a leader, you must strive to eliminate such jobs so your people can do real work. And you too must free up your time, if you see yourself in a bullshit job. Remember, you’re eliminating the job, not the people.

From my experience, I’d like to add three other categories to Graeber’s list.

Let’s check out a few examples.

• Many project managers have to communicate for their teams. However, if the team has effective communication patterns already in place, the project manager can focus on something else. 

• How can you remove pointless approvals and hand discretion back to your team(s)?

• When you have to do a lot of support and investigation calls, does that mean something’s wrong with the quality or user experience of your product? Shouldn’t you be paying more attention there? 

• Why be the internal journalist who consumes updates from the team and radiates it to others? How about championing an enterprise social network? That way, everyone is their own journalist!

Jobs that create nothing valuable need more meetings and calls than otherwise. The meetings are a proxy for importance and the jobs just mask problems in the system. Most people want to do something meaningful instead - I’m sure you do too.