Wanting in work

April 21, 2014  |  ibrainmapadmin

As I was driving up the Newell Highway last week on my way to visit family for Easter I was listening to Life Matters. Natasha Mitchell was speaking to her guest, Economist Jessica Irvine about productivity.

Perhaps if I’d been listening at some other time I might have heard it differently. But as some of you know I’m currently in the middle, well approximately a third of the way through, a month of my writing challenge to find “what I really want.” So with my question in mind, my brain had it’s own particular orientation to the conversation.

I thought about the interface between wanting and work productivity. Here are some of my reflections.

Work for our ancestor father-mother was all about survival. Hunting and gathering when it was daylight to find whatever food was available. Finding shelter, and then sleeping when it was dark and so on. For our earliest ancestors the environment and the physical needs and limitations of the body dictated life and work rhythms. Then with the invention of electricity and lighting, agriculture and machines, work hours were extended but still dictated by external factors, such as the limitation of resources, international time differences and so on.

My point is, that for most of human history the limitations of work were imposed by the external environment, and physical limitations of resources, and then later dictated by the boss or company you worked for.

The hours you worked were imposed from outside.

Until the last decade no one asked you, “what do you want?” in terms of work hours because there was no point.

Because historically and culturally we’ve had someone else dictating our work hours, starting with school, most of us are still working from the old paradigm, that someone else will tell us when to stop. Perhaps more accurately we are caught between two paradigms, the old and a new emerging paradigm that isn’t yet fully formed.

Who should decide when and how you work if there are no longer any limitations to work as is the case in many industries, such as IT, today? Is it up to each of us to decide our workload, and our work life? Are you making that decision, or are you just following along, opening one email, social media page, blog post after another instead of directing your attention and therefore your work outcomes.

Perhaps the hardest thing for each of us in the 21^st century is getting our own attention.

If we never stop to ask, “how do I want to work?” “what do I really want?” or “what is important to me now?” we are likely to be driven by some cultural-social-media-trending that may or may not be going in the direction of what’s important to us.

If we can’t find the right questions that bring us back to our individual motivations and whatever gives us a sense of meaning and purpose we are likely to burnout.

Stress and burnout are the antithesis of productivity.

We need rest and to find what motivates us, what we long for and gives our life meaning and purpose, all of these things affect productivity, perhaps more than the hours we work. In a world that never stops we need to find our individual work rhythm by finding what is important to us, so that we can direct our life from the inside instead of being pulled along by i-chance.

Here are some suggestions to set your internal compass from the inside out:

1. Start the day by asking yourself, “what do I really want?”
2. Notice the question isn’t, “what do I want to do?” because doing has a particular orientation that is very narrow.
3. You could write for 20-30 minutes. Like a kind of reflection to allow yourself to connect into the question. (This is what I call my writing challenge. See previous blogs for more on this).
4. Don’t worry about finding an answer to your question. There is no answer. The important thing is to orient inward. To recognize your emerging wants and needs so you can choose how to manage your day and your time to respond to those changing needs.
5. Then pause through the day, stopping to ask, “what do I want now?” or “what’s important now?” It may help to set a timer to remind yourself to reconnect with your question, which is really an invitation to reconnect with yourself.
6. Then respond to the world. This is inside out living- your needs first and then the world.
7. Everything is learning. The paradigm of right-wrong is past its use by date. Everything is changing so rapidly we need to learn constantly and on the run. If you wait to get it all right you’re likely to become overwhelmed. Life is an experiment, so enjoy the ride and all its discoveries. Knowing what you want is your compass in this sea of uncertainty.
8. Life and work are a dialogue between you and the world. The dialogue begins with knowing yourself, otherwise the world can drive you somewhere you don’t want to go until one day you wake up and realize you’re on the wrong boat.

You can be your own boss. The world is at your fingertips 24/7 via your computer. You can start work when you want. You can wake up and smell, or drink, the coffee any time you choose. Work productivity today may be more about knowing how to pace yourself, direct your own attention and when to pause and refocus than it is about the hours you work or where you work them.

And don’t forget to stop and smell the roses when they bloom because without a rose you may forget what you’re doing it all for.

For those who have a copy of my book, i-brainmap, freeing your brain for happiness, chapter 15 on Orientation may offer some deeper insights into this topic.