What Place does Work Occupy in Our Lives?
By Kurt Schmidt In Blog On May 8, 2014
What place does work occupy in our lives? Do we work to buy time for our true interests? Or because we love it?
This is a thought provoking article – Don’t Fool Yourself: There is No Work/Life Balance via Fast Company
In today’s world a lot of us let work encroach into our personal time (via technology, like the article says) because we feel like we have to. If we don’t reply to emails when they come in it might make us less competitive. Okay, no big deal – except the nature of today’s global economy means that a work day can be stretched across several continents and lots of time zones. How do you deal with it and stay sane?
Writer, Holly Hamann has a few good, if not obvious suggestions, including setting aside 30 minutes at the start of your day to do “something reflective” instead of immediately jumping into email. One of my good friends talks about the value of his morning “constitutional walks” and I like to go on bike rides before work when the weather permits. Other suggestions include prioritizing – My own prioritization exercise consists of one simple question that I ask myself whenever I get stuck: What is the most important thing? The answer to that question always sets me right.
I don’t know that any of these things are really “thought provoking” on their own, like I said in the beginning of this post. However the larger question: What place does work occupy in our lives? is definitely thought provoking.
Do we work to buy time for our true interests? Or because we have the good fortune of loving what we do?
For a lot of us, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. It’s a cliché to say that if you’re not doing what you love then you’re wasting your time. For many people that level of choice is out of reach. However that doesn’t mean that we can’t influence our careers, manage our job-time, figure out why we do what we do and make choices. Without meaning to sound fatalistic, the clock is ticking…
(Photo: Monument Valley, Arizona / Utah 2013)
