One of the most important parts of productivity is finding your motivation, getting crystal clear about why you’re doing things. In this brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness (probably better known as our existence) we might not get around to doing all that we want so it’s a good idea to know which things we most want to do, and knowing the why is pretty clutch for sorting that out.
So when it comes to work for hire, the “for hire” part is not to be skipped over. Knowing that the job pays for a roof over my head, a bed to sleep in, food to eat, that can fire me up to apply my full creativity and wit if it’s a problem-solving job, or care and attention if it’s a more tedious type of job.
I.e. actually thinking “the reason for this job is the paycheck” can be pretty important in order to do the job right and to care about the tasks that are part of the job. Especially with a GTD mindset of how your passion for a goal can and ideally should transfer to the steps you take in pursuit of that goal no matter how off-putting and awful those steps would’ve been without that context.
But these days, saying “the reason for this job is the paycheck” has become taboo in the ears of the employers. It’s a quick way to get easily kicked out of a job interview. They want to be able to pretend that you think the job in and of itself is fun and good, that the embarrassing-for-all-parties bother of the paycheck is a mere inconvenience that should be abolished as soon as we all could get around to it.
And there are tasks like that. Projects where what you’re doing is intrinsically valuable for yourself or for the help it brings others. There’s no shortage of them, either. The world is a broken place and there are so many ways we could help build it up, repair it, or make it better.
Like doing volunteer work whether that’s in a formal context or just hacking on free software projects out of your own proverbial garage. Trouble is, 9999999% of those things don’t pay.
Maro once said that a dream job is a job that 1. You love doing, 2. You’re good at, 3. People pay you for.
I’d add a paragraph zero: something that’s a net active good for society or for myself. It’s a sad state of the world that a lot of jobs do not qualify for that zeroeth paragraph. So many jobs are either all bad, or do more harm than good. Like advertising, as one of many examples. On the train yesterday my eyes were bleeding from the dozens of ads plastered all over the cart. I’m not saying ads don’t have any informative advantages but the disadvantages heavily outweight any good. A world where there aren’t any ads in public spaces might seem like a dream but it would be so restful. And give people space to stare at their phones or whatever since that’s something they seem to truly enjoy doing. Or, more likely, they’re looking at the phones since it’s so punishing to look up and get blasted by ugly ads.
I know for a fact that I’d have no shortage at all of ways to fill my days when I don’t have a job. I’m not just talking about the post-boredom society we live in where we’re the most entertained generation in history, I’m talking about actual fun or good things.
What we do needs to be meaningful.
If your job can be paragraph zero but not paragraph three, uh, that is to say: if it can be intrinsically valuable but not give me three square meals, that’s fine but it’s competing with all those other things we could be spending our time on that might be even more intrinsically valuable.
And if your job, like so many other jobs here, doesn’t even have intrinsic value, if it’s just spam or lies or widening the wealth gap or burninating the countryside, then ditch the fantasy of your employees pretending that the extrinsic motivator (a.k.a. salary) doesn’t matter to them.
Employers, the only reason you might sway us from days of war and nights of love is to the extent you offer a cost-effective way to get healthcare, food, and shelter, especially in this cruel arbetslinjen world, (and by cost-effective I mean cost in the time and toil extracted from us in return for those extrinsic rewards).
If you can’t even do that you might as well close up shop.