Work and Happiness

I wanted to sort out my approach to dealing with work and its result. Note: I have used work, task, and job interchangeably in general sense of physical & mental activity that we perform to create an output. So here we go…

 

Who decides what needs to be done and what need not be done? 

In my opinion, you decide based on your personal, social and professional goals/objectives. If the task adds value to your objective it needs to be done else it need not be done. The key here is to know your respective objectives and to balance these elements of your life by what we generally call as work-life balance :)

 

How to ensure you are happy doing the task that needs to be done?

Sometimes, even though a task needs to be done you don’t really enjoy doing it. The list of tasks that need to be done in your lives can be endless say going on job/cooking/ laundry/ home keeping/ maintenance/ performing certain customs etc. Whether you like them or not is not important in the larger scheme of things. So how do you work around this situation?

a. If you like the task – Awesome combination. You are doing what you like to do and it adds value to your set objectives

b. If you don’t like the task – Leads to frustration. The point is now on how to reduce this frustration. The options you have are

• Continue to work without liking the work and be unhappy
• Don’t do the work and face the consequences of not doing that work (no job-no money, no cooking-no food, etc... You get the drift right :))
• Outsource or mechanize the work (generally seen with home keeping and maintenance kind of work)
• Try to be motivated by thinking that a required work will be completed i.e. become duty oriented (e.g. as an adult I need to do a job and be financially independent or as a responsible family member I need to give a hand in house chores and perform maintenance task etc.)
• Continue to work while simultaneously exploring ways to either bring meaning to the current work or redefining your objectives and preparing for new opportunities

Below is a simple matrix summarising the points

  

At the end of the day, I would like to enjoy what I do and would like to believe that the task is adding value to larger scheme of things.