A few months ago my company decided to paint a bunch of the offices and I asked if they could include mine in the process.   The person who had the office before me had it done as a tribute to his favorite baseball team-The Detroit Tigers.  Needless to say, although I really liked Sparky Anderson when I was a kid, it was time for a change.  

As a son of a construction foreman, I am more savvy than the average person when it comes to how things are built, etc.   My office has 4 basic walls, 1 big window and a door.  For two professional painters, this job should have been knocked out in just a few hours.  Somehow the two men, who painted my office, managed to take 2 days.  The painters worked by the hour, so they were in no hurry to finish it quickly.   They were sandbagging. Covered in plastic, my office was very unproductive for 2 days.  They were able to stretch, a 2 hour job into 16 hours, so they could make it till Friday.  This is not an assumption-they actually shared this with me.  Admittedly so, they were sandbagging.  In their line of work, in the short term, sometimes sandbagging is necessary in order to have somewhere to go each day.  Yet, sandbagging too much and too often could cause their employer to seek out more efficient painters.  

In case you are not familiar with the term "sandbagging"...

Definition according to Urban Dictionary: "When a player in any game chooses (on purpose) to not play their best. Normally this is because they are too superior, they want to hustle you, or they are too lazy to play their best with nothing on the line".

We all have our sandbag moments.   We all have days where we could do more, crush a goal and raise the bar, but decide to sandbag. Maybe it's because we are lazy, because we have accomplished a lot already or we're like the painters and just "stretching" our job.  We have all had days where we have had to look busy while we are waiting for the clock to hit 5:00pm.  

It's a matter of how much and how often we are sandbagging. If you are spending each day at work devising ways to stretch your workweek till Friday, you are sandbagging.  By doing this, you are not living up to your potential. You are not breaking records, raising the bar, dictating expectations or changing the game.   You are just existing and not growing.  Shame on you.  

If you have the ability to work and create at a high level, why would you want to slow down?  Where's the fun in laying off the accelerator and not running up the score?  All of us should live life like we are playing a video game!  You can't put your initials in (or the letters A-S-S) if you don't try to crush the previous person's score.  If you are willing to dump more quarters in on a silly game, then you should be able to dig deeper and look to accomplish more.  

By raising the bar of expectations in you career, you will be less likely to get questioned about your productivity.  For the most part, we are doing jobs that have been done before.  You aren't kidding anyone by sandbagging.  Employers or peers are not going to buy for a minute that the bar, of the role you play, suddenly got lowered.  The contractor, that employs the painters, was probably once a painter himself and knows that an office like mine doesn't take 16 hours to paint.  

By raising the bar in life and career, you set expectations.  By setting the expectation you are in control of your future. 

Be honest with yourself.  Are you sandbagging or running up the score?