15. Work That Works

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    Happy Tuesday!

    Imagine it's 6:54 AM on Monday morning and your lying in bed trying desperately to enjoy the next 6 minutes of peace before your phone alarm goes off.  At 7:00 AM you'll have to drag yourself out of bed and start your Monday.

    Your calendar is full of meetings, your inbox is full of emails, deadlines loom, but you can't find time to work because you're spending all your time dealing with yet another crisis. Today's going to be a long day, and so is tomorrow, and this week, and this month.

    It never seems to end.

    How did I end up here? This new job wasn't supposed to be like the last job but after 6 months it feels exactly the same. Maybe once I get a promotion things will be better? Maybe once I finish this project? Maybe after I finish up with this client?

    Whether you like it or not, you will probably spend between a third to a half of your waking life working. How do you make decisions about how that time should be spent?

    What Should Work Be?

    Many of my friends in their late twenties and early thirties spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they want this huge part of their life to look like. Maybe they tried a few different jobs but they never found anything that seemed to fit.

    Your parents, your partner, and your friends all have an opinion about what you should or shouldn't be doing and it's hard not be influenced by this. On top of that there's all the cultural messaging that surrounds us, in movies, TV shows, on social media etc. It's impossible to block it all out.

    I struggle with these questions myself but I've found the following concept useful when making decisions about how I should be spending my working life. No matter what job or work you are doing there's really three things to optimize for:

    • Compensation
    • Craft
    • Impact

    Compensation is obviously how much money you receive in exchange for your time and effort. This could include benefits as well, free time off, flexibility etc.

    Craft is how much enjoyment you get from doing the work itself. Think of the craft as your day to day activities and the actual problems you solve. If you're a doctor and you love working with patients you are optimizing for your craft. If you're an artist and you love painting you're optimizing for craft.

    Impact is the extent to which the work you do or the organization you work for serves a cause or a population of people you care about. The population you serve doesn't have to be big and it doesn't have to be traditionally "needy and deserving".  It just has to be a group that really matters to you.

    Any job you do is going to optimize for one or more of these elements. Problems tend to occur when:

    • You're only optimizing for one element
    • You're optimizing for the wrong elements
    • You're not sure which elements matter most to you

    For most of us the holy grail is finding work that has the right balance of all three elements but this isn't always easy. The next best option is to optimize for two of the three. In my experience, if you can do that, then you're doing pretty damn good.

    It's really important to understand as well that none of this is static. For example, your preference for impact vs. compensation is likely to change throughout your life. As you accumulate more wealth, compensation might start to matter less and impact more.

    The trick is to figure out which elements are most important to you now and then optimize for those things. For me, right now, my ranking looks like this:

    1. Craft
    2. Compensation
    3. Impact

    How are you optimizing across these elements? Are you doing work that works for you?

    Cheers,

    Nick

    © Nick Nathan, 2022