Finding the Goal of the Goal: Resetting Academic Library Work When You’re Doing More With Less

When you're down two colleagues, buried in reference requests, and still expected to run instruction sessions, social media, and assessment reports, it’s natural to ask: How can I keep doing all this?

Dan Heath’s new book, Reset: How To Change What’s Not Working (Avid Reader, Jan. 2025), offers a bold response: you shouldn't. Instead of pushing through failing systems, Heath urges us to locate "leverage points"—places where small, intentional changes yield big, lasting returns—and to reorganize our resources accordingly.

This isn’t about abandoning your responsibilities. It’s about transforming how you work by questioning whether the systems you're supporting still serve their purpose.

Maya’s Story: When Keeping Up Stops Making Sense

Maya, an academic librarian at a regional university, found herself doing the jobs of three people after two colleagues retired. As her inbox piled up and her to-do list swelled, she realized she was maintaining work that no longer aligned with her library’s current needs.

One day, she sat down with her monthly usage report—a report no one had commented on in over a year. She asked herself a question inspired by Heath’s book: What’s the goal of the goal?

Originally, the report was meant to demonstrate the ROI of a new database purchase. That database wasn’t even under review anymore. The leverage point, she realized, wasn’t the report itself—it was finding better ways to demonstrate impact.

1. Locate the Leverage Point—And Align It With Patron Success

Dan Heath emphasizes that the most effective projects are the ones that advance the mission of the organization and make the customer successful. For libraries, the “customer” is broad: students trying to graduate, faculty preparing lectures or publishing, staff needing research help or access to internal knowledge.

When Maya paused to assess her workload, she realized many of her routine tasks weren’t contributing directly to anyone’s success. No student was citing the outdated LibGuide. No faculty member had requested the data newsletter in over a year. These were zombie projects—once useful, now undead, still consuming her time.

So she reset. She asked:

• Which projects actually help a student finish their paper on time?
  
  
• Which tasks make a faculty member’s teaching or research easier?
  
  
• What supports the library’s role in advancing institutional goals?
  
  

She started saying “yes” to collaborative instruction sessions and custom research guides for high-enrollment courses—and “no” to legacy processes that only survived because no one had questioned them.

This realignment became her new filter:
Does this project make our patrons more successful?
If not, why are we doing it?

2. Reorganize Resources—Starting With Yourself

In the second half of Reset, Heath explores how organizations can reallocate resources to support their most valuable leverage points. In a library, the resource most in danger is often your time.

When your manager is stretched thin or absent, you have to do what Heath suggests: act as your own project manager. Maya started managing herself with three guiding practices:

• A “stop doing” list to shed invisible burdens
  
  
• Clearer communication about priorities with colleagues
  
  
• Permission to pause anything not tied to student or faculty success
  
  

Instead of grinding harder, she redistributed her limited energy toward projects with visible outcomes—like co-designing new instruction modules with faculty.

3. Build a Team Culture That Supports Letting Go

One of Heath’s central insights is that sustainable change requires systemic support, not just individual hustle. Maya brought her team together to do something unconventional: they inventoried every recurring project and classified each one:

• Mission-critical
  
  
• Important but flexible
  
  
• Nice to have
  
  
• Legacy (past usefulness, present burden)
  
  

They found several programs that no longer had an audience or a champion—and retired them. What emerged was a leaner, more focused vision of library work that reflected their new reality.

This approach—what Heath might call resource reallocation toward leverage points—helped the team cope with their reduced size while improving morale.

Final Thought: Reset Is Not About Quitting—It’s About Reframing

Dan Heath reminds us that the goal isn't just to fix broken systems—it’s to question whether they should still exist in the first place. For academic libraries dealing with burnout, short staffing, and institutional uncertainty, that perspective is liberating.

Ask: What’s the goal of the goal?
Find your leverage points.
Reorganize what you can control.
And stop doing the things that are only surviving out of habit.