My philosophy behind work and exploring ways to make almost any job more enjoyable without fundamentally changing its responsibilities.
Work should be an mostly-enjoyable way of spending 80,000 hours of life. To spend that doing something mostly-unenjoyable is borderline torturous and definitely stupid: the worker will simply end up bitter, unhappy, and unfulfilled having just wasted the 30-40 most energetic and prime years of life.
Notice I say "mostly-enjoyable". The naive person who came up with "find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life" has got some serious explaining to do, and the poor schmuck who believes it has got some major reality checks ahead of him. (I know the "never" part is hyperbole, but there are some people out there who don't realize that). There are very, very, very few jobs in which that quote rings true. I was lucky enough to bag one of these bad boys with my university job (AggieFab). I can count the number of times I didn't look forward to work on one hand and still have fingers left over. This came with a price: I was given extremely high expectations for what future jobs would look and feel like, when in fact the AggieFab job was the exception, not the norm.
Almost every job out there will have boring days, spreadsheet work, and pointless, yet required, meetings. Almost every job out there will have days where you don't want to go in. To make work enjoyable, the intensity, duration, and frequency of those feelings and actions should be minimized and the intensity, duration, and frequency of good/fun/enjoyable activities maximized. This is obvious, but some of those characteristics are fixed, meaning you can't get out of that hour-long meeting in 30 minutes, sorry.
It's important to note that a balance must be struck between doing what you love and paying the bills/saving for retirement after meeting a few basic requirements.
Now, a few considerations of finding this mythical balance:
In practice, there should be a lower limit for job satisfaction, regardless of compensation, that triggers quitting or searching for new work. Continuing to work in those conditions wreaks havoc on mental health and most likely negatively affects other aspects of life, including physical health. This lower limit is subjective based on discomfort tolerance.
I remember my first few days at AggieFab. I had no clue what to do task-wise or even what the lab really did and didn't know my coworkers very well. I was lost. The work I was being assigned was menial—mundane tasks that soon led to me questioning my decision to work here. I noticed the satisfaction curve trended upwards the more I interacted with my coworkers and lab users. I began to learn more about them: their cultures (a majority were international students), their interests outside of work, their personal lives, their career aspirations. I became friends with almost everyone who worked there, and good friends with a handful.
It was when I reached the multiple-friend level that I realized work had become a social activity and that was a major factor in why I looked forward to it so much. We told jokes, gave advice, talked about weekend escapades, alongside actual work.
There is a reason why parties are fun and quarantining during a pandemic sucks: we enjoy spending time with friends. We enjoy talking with them about this and that, we enjoy just having silent company. This basic fact is why making and developing friendships at work is so important: by it becoming a form of social activity, the dreadful tone of voice that typically accompanies "work" is dropped and all that's left is the excitement of spending 40-50 hours a week with some of your best buds!
Gamification has become more popular in the past few years, especially in health and education spaces. The strategies I refer to are such:
Early gamification strategies use rewards for players who accomplish desired tasks or competition to engage players. Types of rewards include points, achievement badges or levels, the filling of a progress bar, or providing the user with virtual currency. Making the rewards for accomplishing tasks visible to other players or providing leader boards are ways of encouraging players to compete.
I've found great success in using gamification for satisfaction in work and life. While I don't use an app or official system, I keep track of to-do progress in my head or design my work for it to show visually, boosting motivation whenever a task is completed.
Care should be taken to avoid Goodhart's law, as doing tasks just for the sake of numbers is not a good idea:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Progress can be measured in ways other than just number of tasks completed.
Promotions are a subjective measurement of progress. From one perspective, being promoted proves your value to the organization and their recognition of that. However, it can also mean playing politic cards correctly and/or being in the right place at the right time (although there is a bare minimum of competence that must be met, so progress is virtually guaranteed).
On the other hand, not being promoted does not necessarily mean you have not made progress—it can mean that, but is not the default. Lack of promotion can have a variety of factors, including management, company policy, or lack of understanding about the employee's value. (Electoral promotions in which a diverse group of peers vote on the promotion is a good way to mitigate these factors. They are more likely to understand value and provide honest feedback.)
Compensation is (generally/hopefully) directly related to promotions and provides tangible measurement of progress. Voluntary raises and bonuses show improvement at your job and the value of your work.
A bit less related to the actual job, the amount of savings one has can be used a time-based progress measurement towards retirement or financial independence. Seeing the number creep up towards the final FIRE number makes work feel like it's for something (other than personal satisfaction and cost-of-living, if applicable).
A central tenet in my life philosophy is that contribution to something—a personal project, a company, a movement—is a major factor towards life satisfaction. Everyone wants to feel like they mattered somehow. As Applied Divinity Studies says in their Bus Factor 1:
A friend at a prominent tech company took last month off using their new covid policy. When he got back to work last week, he was horrified. Not to see that things had fallen apart in his absence, but to realize that they hadn’t. Overwhelmingly, life without him had continued as normal.
Seeing personal work make a positive impact to others and on a large-scale reinforces the want/need to contribute, forming a positive feedback loop: work → contribution → more work → more contribution → ... → world domination.
Designing work to be impactful is partially fixed and partially variable as determined by the worker:
Serving as a mentor to junior employees improves their experience and provides a different, yet not insignificant, sense of contribution. The mentee may also become a friend.
See Mentorship.
Health, and by extension energy, are often unthought-of and thus neglected. Compare performing a hobby while exhausted versus fully rested: the difference is likely stark. Lack of energy makes most tasks less enjoyable and a drag to get through.
Increasing energy is a matter of three things:
The standard workday starts around 8:00am, ends somewhere around 4:00-6:00pm, and includes a few breaks. The degree to which this works and is enjoyable can depend heavily on one's chronotype, or their natural circadian rhythm.
Working based on this schedule is a double-edged sword: you are working during your favorite hours to be awake, but your personal hours don't align as such. This increases work satisfaction, but decreases personal time satisfaction. Some rough ideas for morning/evening individuals:
Personal time can also be split into periods at either end of the workday, which is what I do to schedule training (exercise):
Or in the middle of the day to get more sunlight time:
Weekly schedules can also be personalized by finding suitable 40+-hour combinations:
While still totaling the same number of hours, the less-days-longer-days approach may give back more time during the week due to less commuting. However, it comes at the cost of less free time and energy during work days.
The flip side of making something more enjoyable is making it less unenjoyable, i.e., reducing unenjoyable activities frequency or effects will increase the net sum of satisfaction further away from zero.
There has been significant research done on burnout which is summarized below.
In Beating Burnout, Valcour identifies three main components to burnout:
Exhaustion is the central symptom of burnout. It comprises profound physical, cognitive, and emotional fatigue that undermines people’s ability to work effectively and feel positive about what they’re doing. This can stem from the demands of an always-on, 24/7 organizational culture, intense time pressure, or simply having too much to do, especially when you lack control over your work, dislike it, or don’t have the necessary skills to accomplish it.
Cynicism, also called depersonalization, represents an erosion of engagement. It is essentially a way of distancing yourself psychologically from your work. Instead of feeling invested in your assignments, projects, colleagues, customers, and other collaborators, you feel detached, negative, even callous. Cynicism can be the result of work overload, but it is also likely to occur in the presence of high conflict, unfairness, and lack of participation in decision making.
Inefficacy refers to feelings of incompetence and a lack of achievement and productivity. People with this symptom of burnout feel their skills slipping and worry that they won’t be able to succeed in certain situations or accomplish certain tasks. It often develops in tandem with exhaustion and cynicism because people can’t perform at their peak when they’re out of fuel and have lost their connection to work. ... But burnout can also start with inefficacy if you lack the resources and support to do your job well, including adequate time, information, clear expectations, autonomy, and good relationships with those whose involvement you need to succeed. The absence of feedback and meaningful recognition, which leaves you wondering about the quality of your work and feeling that it’s unappreciated, can also activate this component.
As well as recovery and prevention techniques:
It’s essential to replenish your physical and emotional energy, along with your capacity to focus, by prioritizing good sleep habits, nutrition, exercise, social connection, and practices that promote equanimity and well-being, like meditating, journaling, and enjoying nature. If you’re having troubling squeezing such activities into your packed schedule, give yourself a week to assess exactly how you’re spending your time. ... For each block of time, record what you’re doing, whom you’re with, how you feel, and how valuable the activity is. This will help you find opportunities to limit your exposure to tasks, people, and situations that aren’t essential and put you in a negative mood; increase your investment in those that boost your energy; and make space for restful, positive time away from work.
What aspects of your situation are truly fixed, and which can you change? Altering your perspective can buffer the negative impact of even the inflexible aspects. If exhaustion is a key problem, ask yourself which tasks—including critical ones—you could delegate to free up meaningful time and energy for other important work. Are there ways to reshape your job in order to gain more control or to focus on the most fulfilling tasks? If cynicism is a major issue, can you shield yourself from the parts of the organization that frustrate you, while reengaging in your specific role and the whole enterprise? Or could you build some positive, supportive relationships to counteract the ones that drain you? And if you’re feeling ineffective, what assistance or development might you seek out? If recognition is lacking, could you engage in some personal branding to showcase your work?
You’ll also need to target high-value activities and relationships that still trigger unhealthy stress. This involves resetting the expectations of colleagues, clients, and even family members for what and how much you’re willing to take on, as well as ground rules for working together.
The best antidote to burnout, particularly when it’s driven by cynicism and inefficacy, is seeking out rich interpersonal interactions and continual personal and professional development. Find coaches and mentors who can help you identify and activate positive relationships and learning opportunities. Volunteering to advise others is another particularly effective way of breaking out of a negative cycle.
Two distinct contributors to the experience of work life explain burnout’s persistence as an experience, a matter of social importance, and a focus of scientific inquiry. The first contributor is a persistent imbalance of demands over resources (Aiken et al., 2001; Bakker and Demerouti, 2007). When demands increase –, e.g. more service recipients with more intense requirements – resources fail to keep pace. There are insufficient personnel, equipment, supplies, or space to meet the demand (Aiken et al., 2002). Insufficient opportunities to rest and regenerate depleted energy aggravate the exhausting impact of demand/resource imbalances. The second contributor concerns motives rather than energy. Employees in the twenty-first century view organizational missions, visions, and values with skepticism (Hemingway and Maclagan, 2004). Employees may hold personal values that differ from the organizations.
Another form of conflict occurs between the organization’s stated values and its values in action (Argyris, 1982). Employees exercise severe judgment when they witness a gap between organizational intentions and reality. Rather than attributing the shortfall to market conditions or bad luck, they often attribute the problem to corporate hypocrisy. This attribution may apply to the entire executive level or it may pertain to distinct individuals who are abusing positions of authority to exploit the company for their personal gain. In these scenarios, employees accept the organizations’ espoused values. They experience conflict with the values they attribute to the organizations’ shortcomings.
Preventing Burnout, Eastern Washington State.
Consequences Associated with School Burnout (Gardner, 2014)
- sleep deprivation
- change in eating habits
- increased illness due to weakened immune system
- difficulty concentrating and poor memory/attention
- lack of productivity
- poor performance
- avoidance of responsibilities
- loss of enjoyment
Note that the above list is associated with, but not necessarily caused by, burnout. The state consequences can be caused by a number of things and should be examined individually.
More burnout resources: