TIM DUGGAN
THERE’s a predictable pattern to how most of our lives unfold after we enter the workforce. It’s a well-trodden path that we tend to think little about - and it’s one of the reasons that the way we are working is broken.
The default path is that after leaving school or university, you begin to look for a job in an area that matches your interest or expertise. After some job hunting, you eventually find a business that will employ you and begin in the most junior position in the company. Your employer decides how much salary they will pay you for your work and you slowly start the climb up the corporate ladder. Each week or month, a payment drops directly into your bank account and you use it to pay for your lifestyle needs.
For many, this cycle repeats over and over until work becomes primarily a means of earning a salary to pay for whatever lifestyle that money affords you. I call this the work-money-life cycle, and it can be a very hard mindset to get out of. Although it’s the primary way that many generations have lived and worked, due to a variety of reasons this approach is now breaking.
Broken approach
Don’t just take my word for it. Study after study has shown that we are working longer hours than before, even with the rise of things like hybrid working. Microsoft, which collects data every time you interact with one of its products, tracked how long people around the world spend using its Teams software. They looked at the two years after the pandemic began in March 2020 and found that when many people shifted to logging in from home instead of the office, the length of the average workday increased by 13% or 46 minutes.
Furthermore, where most professional workers traditionally had two productivity peaks in their day (before and after lunch), the same researchers observed the emergence of an additional peak of work taking place in the late evening. They call this a “triple peak day”.
None of these trends paint a particularly rosy picture of the future of work, so how can we fix it? The answer is to start with what we can control: our individual response to how we think about work.
Reverse thinking
To create a more balanced approach, we need to reverse our thinking. Instead of work-money-life, we need to flip the focus to life-money-work, with each element prioritised in this order. The good news is that anyone can do this by following three steps.
The first step is to change direction – and to do that, you’re going to need a “MAP”. This acronym stands for “meaning”, “anchors” and “priorities”. Meaning is about understanding the real value or deeper meaning you get from your work. Anchors are the three or four core values that make you unique; and priorities are about consciously deciding how you spend your time on things that are important to you.
Once you have your MAP, you must assess what “enough” is for you. This is a very personal part of the process, as everyone’s version of how much money and success they need is different. However, figuring out how much money you need to live a life you’re happy with, and quantifying an exact annual figure on paper, can be an incredibly freeing exercise.
The final step is to think about work (which is usually what most of us begin with). Once you know what meaning you get from work, what your anchors are and what you want to prioritise (as well as how much money you need), you can focus on the type of work you should be doing.
This process of figuring it out in reverse of the traditional order is called the work backwards method.
New tools
We are living through a once-in-a-generation moment in which we have access to a vast variety of tools that enable us to work in different – and smarter - ways. Some of these include hybrid working and flexible four-day weeks, as well as technological advancements like AI that can augment our jobs by removing time-intensive tasks.
* Edited from article published in Fast Company US