Work occupies most of our time each day. Work literally becomes our life. How do we achieve what’s most important to us when work determines what we do with our time? Is it about work-life balance? And how does quiet quitting fit in?
The following is a text version of this blog posting.
I want you to think about something for a moment. Think about a typical day in your life. What activity or activities occupy most of your time? Maybe you never thought about that. But it’s worth considering. Now I’d like you to think about something else. What’s the most important thing you do, the thing that you value the most? For many people, what we do with most of our time isn’t what we value the most.
In a series of essays published as a book called The Writing Life, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” As the term “quietly quitting” has been discussed more in the media, I’ve thought more about this quote from Annie Dillard. I’ve wondered how most people view the way they spend their days.
Most of us spend our days at work, including the time we get ready for work, have a lunch break from work, and finish our day at work. For many people, that includes commuting to and from work. Some people find that they need to work two jobs just to make ends meet.
In his now classic book published in 1990, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that many people working in routine jobs, like manufacturing in assembly plants, entered into a state of flow by either making a game of the work or having a higher purpose for the work, like providing for one’s family. But work has changed since he conducted his original research. Now at nearly two generations since he conducted the experiments that were in the book, Flow, work isn’t about manufacturing plants but more typically at a computer, processing forms and data and doing other repetitive tasks that require attention to detail and focus. This kind of work is true for customer service representatives, business executives, and even for me as a professor teaching online.
Having a sense of flow, a sense of fulfillment in work requires that someone find an intrinsic value in the work, that there’s clarity in the goals of why the work is done, and that there’s a feeling of control over the work. While there are other characteristics of flow, it seems to me that many people who are frustrated with their jobs find no real value in what they do, don’t know why they are doing it, and have little sense of control over their jobs.
Let’s add to that what I’ve seen called online the counterpart of quietly quitting: quietly firing employees. Quiet firing is part of the frustration of many employees today. The workload and demands of jobs increase. Jobs don’t seem to have intrinsic value, there seems to be no real reason for doing the work and little control over the job Not only that, but the rate of a salary increase doesn’t keep up with the cost of living with typical annual raises between 1 and 3%. It’s not a real incentive for working. Quiet firing seems to me to be a way to disempower people in the workforce.
My goal here isn’t to encourage people to quit their jobs, quietly or actively. Instead, my goal is to think about how you are spending your time and what you value. No matter what job you have, how do you incorporate what you truly value? How you spend your time is your life. So. what’s important to you? Is being a kind or happy person a value you hold? Then how do you manifest that in the places you are? Is helping people important to you? Then what does that mean when you’re in the place where you spend most of your time? Is being centered and grounded important to you? When you think about eight to ten hours a day at work, what does it mean to be centered and grounded?
On the other hand, as you think about what’s important to you, what do you need to give up or stop doing? For example, I had a realization a while ago about my career. I decided to do many of the things I did with my career because I wanted to help people. That’s why I became a minister, a psychologist, a professor … all of it. I’m not saying I didn’t do that, but I spent far too much time in senseless meetings. I should have done less of that. I should have been absent a lot more and focused more on doing what was important to me.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” What’s important in your life? Does that color the way you spend your days?