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Many people are now reevaluating the priority of where work fits, and discovering that they’re not as motivated by spending the most productive years trying to reach the top of the pyramid.
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Sometimes a job is just a job, and nothing more. Of course, work should provide at least some amount of meaning in our lives, but you’d be surprised at how little that can be.
One of the most interesting insights into this came from a 2009 paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine looking at burnout rates among doctors in a large medical centre in the US. Doctors generally have a large amount of autonomy to choose where to spend their time, such as caring for patients, research, education or administration.
For the study they asked doctors to track how much of their time they spent doing aspects of their job they personally found meaningful, and compared that to their rate of burnout. They found that doctors who spent just 20 per cent of their time on the areas that gave them meaning were a lot less likely to burn out compared to those who spent less time.
Fascinatingly, the researchers also discovered a ‘ceiling effect’ which showed that even if the doctors spent more than 20 per cent of their time on meaningful tasks, the effect on their levels of burnout remained the same.
In other words, it doesn’t matter what type of work you do, you just need to spend around one-fifth of your work time doing something you find meaningful to get the maximum benefits.
This blows up the idea that we all need to strive to find a calling that’s going to fulfil us every hour of the working day. Instead, you just need to be aware of what areas you get meaning from, and consciously decide to lean slightly more into them.
If you do that, it doesn’t matter whether you have a job, a career or a calling, we’ll all get the same amount of benefit from it. In fact, it’s about time that we rewrote the original quote. “Find a job you don’t hate,” it should go, “and you’ll still work many days of your life.”
Sure, it mightn’t be as catchy, but at least it’s truthful.
Tim Duggan’s new book, Work Backwards, is out now. He writes a monthly newsletter, OUTLET, that gives One Useful Thing Literally Every Time, at timduggan.substack.com
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