THE MYSTERY OF WORK

Years ago I was walking through London and as I stared up at a skyscraper my companion asked “do you sometimes wonder what they all do in there all day?”

I ask the same question as I go through an airport early in the morning, removing my shoes and belt as I queue for security and seeing all these businesspeople rushing off to Euro-meetings.
Fast Company on Friday had a piece entitled “Why productive people have empty schedules” mostly dealing with Warren Buffett’s diary and his ability to keep it free and provide himself with time to think.

The article went on to explain that if we’re going to do the work that we want to do, we need to own our time because it’s limited:

• Time is highly limited: As humans, we're immature in our first decades, and declining in health in our last. 
• Time is uniquely limited: You can't bank, transfer, or recover time, unlike money. 
• Time is equitably limited: we can, on average, expect to live about 77 years. That expectation isn't equal with resources like money. 

So if you are creative and that’s where your greatest earning capacity and, more importantly, where your greatest contribution lies, spend your time feeding that urge and honing that skill.

Most of us are trying to redefine what work is – I, for instance, haven’t worked as such for years. I spend my time doing stuff I enjoy. But what I do not especially enjoy are old fashioned skyscraper offices.

I’m puzzled by the need to have such offices with partner desks, carpets and filing cabinets. Places of Victorian labour. Yet when I speculate about creative spaces and working from home, my godchildren, nearly all of them major successes and working 60 hour weeks, look at me as though I’m mad. The truth is they seem to like being punished by the tyranny of work and having a grey office in which to lament the amount they have to do.

We are obsessed by work and by jobs. We seem to believe the Chinese or Indians or Americans or Germans work harder than us. They don’t. And the jobs most of them are doing are old fashioned.

We are spending too little time thinking about that and the fact that around 2/3 of today’s schoolchildren will end up doing jobs that haven’t been invented yet.

So just ask yourself the question “what do I really do all day?” and “why?”

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