How to make your work meaningful (part 2)

The second thing you need to do for your work to be meaningful — regardless of pay, position or industry

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

In my first article of this series, I introduced the idea that what we truly desire in our work is more meaning and that meaningful work can be created regardless of what your job is. The first thing to do to make your work more meaningful is to make it more personal. That is, to connect your work to who you are at your core, in order to attain and sustain a state of alignment and flow. This requires a commitment to knowing yourself and leading yourself into that alignment.

Here’s the second way to create meaningful work:

Make your work productive.

We have a bit of an obsession with productivity in our current work culture. From books, to planners, to journals, to software, etc. Everyone has a secret sauce, bullet-proof solution to crushing your work goals. If you are like me, you have tried almost all of them, trying to hack your own work habits and unlock some hyper-productive mode you never new existed, ultimately to no avail. That doesn’t stop you (or me) from buying into the next one.

This obsession is warranted as it comes from a real emotionally taxed place for most of us. How often do you get to the end of your day tired, burnt out, and overwhelmed, yet you cannot give an account for any true progress that you’ve made? This cycle of a lack of productivity compounds over time, leaving us unfulfilled and anxious about our work and thus, our life direction.

The other side of that terrible coin is those days where you feel like you did in fact do a lot of tasks, cranking through your list, only to find that none of those accomplishments truly move your work forward in any significant way. Yes, Busywork can still be unproductive.

A mental shift around productivity is long overdue. Here’s my suggestion. Consider thinking about productivity more from an agricultural perspective rather than an industrial lens.

When you hold yourself to an ideal of “production” that was originally intended for literal machines, you’re bound to fall short. Consider instead the root of productivity is to produce, as in to create something tangible, useful, and often beautiful. This is what we see in nature, when a garden is properly tended and resourced, the produce is undeniable, bountiful, and consistent. Perhaps a better word to describe this kind of productivity is creation, not production.

This is what makes your work not only productive, but meaningful. Meaningful work is that which is making daily, tangible, measurable progress on your most important initiatives.

Here’s a few ways to get started on making your work more productive:

Recommended tool

The first step is to know what is most important. My team and I call this “knowing what it means to win at your job.” If you are playing golf but using a basketball scoreboard, you’re going to feel lost not even knowing if you are productive or not. The same is true for your work. Do you know what your key initiatives and metrics are in this season? Getting clarity on this is vital. The second step is to set up a trusted system for productivity. Spoiler: Ultimately there is to no secret sauce or silver bullet. The system that works for you is the one you will work. Whether it’s digital or analog, morning or evening, the key is to have the resources and practices that you can be consistent with on a daily basis. The tool I recommend for both knowing how to win at your job and for creating a trusted system is: Best Workday Ever by Jeff Tanner. This easy to read ebook uses the eight practices of the The Formation Method to guide you through making progress on your most important work.

Questions for reflection

1. What are your most important long-term initiatives? What does daily progress on those initiatives look like?
2. What tends to derail you from having a productive workday? What helps you recover from that derailment?
3. Do you have a trusted system? What tools, practices, rhythms do you need to make your system trust worthy?
4. How can you make the mental shift from productivity being about mechanic production to meaningful creation?

Again, remember your meaningful work cannot be created or sustained in isolation. While your trusted system for productivity has to ultimately work for you, there is still a need for community and collaboration with others to keep us sustained and accountable in the process. Consider including rhythms of group coaching, coworking, and other means of guidance and support with others.

To your meaningful work,

Jonathon

P.S. I created a 3 part video series that goes deeper into each of these for the FLDWRK community, which you can access here.