Phrase Meaning – Understanding ‘How You Get Any Work Done is Beyond Me’

phrase-meaningphrases

In one episode of the Friends series, the group is talking about the benefits of being a man and a woman. Here's the script:

Rachel: Come on! You guys can pee standing up.

Chandler: We can? All right, I'm tryin' that.

Joey: Ok, you know what blows my mind? Women can see breasts any time they want. You just look down and there they are. How you get any work done is beyond me.

I don't get this part exactly: "How you get any work done is beyond me."

Here's my guess: You must be so busy looking at your breasts all the time that you don't have time to do any work? Am I right?

Best Answer

Your guess is correct, and while other answers have already confirmed this, I just wanted to share the "missing parts" of the sentence that might help you gain a better understanding:

(The method of) how you get any work done is beyond me (in another realm of understanding, unreachable for the speaker)

The speaker, a male, makes the joke about the fact that (in his opinion) breasts are distracting (from the sexual viewpoint of a male), to the point of not being able to do anything else but looking at them.
However, one of the key points of the joke is that the speaker is not taking into account the fact that women do not feel the same way about their own anatomy.

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