Don't Go to Work Unless It's Fun!

SECTION ONE: WHY READ THIS BOOK?

Chapter 1: WHY YOU SHOULD – OR SHOULDN’T – READ THIS BOOK

Of the many reasons to read this book, the best one is that work can and should be fun for everyone. It explores some of the myths that prevent work from being fun and what you can do to free yourself from these myths.

But first, let’s look at some reasons not to read it. The statement, Don’t go to work unless it’s fun, shocks a lot of people. Typical responses are: There will be a lot of people out of work. This is impossible. Ideally, I agree with you, but ... If you have any of these doubts, I ask you to suspend them. If you can’t, don’t read the book. You have to be willing to make the thesis of this book work for you. Otherwise, you’ll continually try to disprove the idea that work can be fun. However, if you are committed to making your work fun, this book will help you.

In case you are still reviewing this book to try to discover the key point, here it is right now. If you find that your work is not fun for you, you have three options: change what bothers you, change your attitude or change your job. The underlying premise of these three options is: Take charge of your life applies to work as well: we are in charge. We will explore many actions you can take make work fun and to gain mastery of your time. That’s option number one. However, perhaps even more important is re-evaluating your attitudes, option number two. I will also say a little about the third option – changing jobs – but I’ll give you a tip right now: If you are currently thinking that you probably should change jobs, you probably should!

My friend Charlie Giglio once summarized my Time Management workshop as follows: Write it down, don’t be a cry baby and do it! Not bad! One of the reasons we don’t take action is that we are trapped in unexamined attitudes that keep us stuck. Perhaps we can uncover and change those attitudes so you can create satisfaction and pleasure in freedom of choice.

If you are committed to maximize your work life, you can. Change may not happen overnight. Tomorrow may not be an uproarious riot at work. But if you have patience, you can get on the road to having your work be satisfying – and fun.

So, I encourage you not to read with the attitude of trying to disproving this thesis of the book, but with the attitude: What would it take for me to look forward to going to work every day?

Chapter 2: WHAT IS FUN?

In guiding you to make your work fun, I am not trying to be the Social Director of the Titanic. That is, I don’t want to give you a series of tips or techniques that try to cover over fundamental problems. You may have serious issues facing you. Ultimately you may actually have to move to option three, to quit your job! On the surface, this journey may not look like fun, but it is the road to creating satisfaction. A better title for this book might be, Don’t Go to Work Unless It’s Satisfying. Fun implies a temporary condition – short term gratification, lightness, laughter. Satisfaction implies long term gratification. In my workshops I ask people to rate how much fun their job was on a scale from one to ten, ten being highest. I think I have one person who gave himself a ten since 1995. I wouldn’t even rate my own job as a ten in fun. But I would give it a ten in satisfaction. I don’t know how work can always be fun, but I do know how it can always be satisfying. And let’s see if we can notch it up in the fun area as well.

Then again, even dealing with a hard issue like changing jobs could be fun, if we are willing to have it be that way. For example, a while back I was teaching in Vermont and got a call at midnight about a fire in Santa Barbara which eventually burned 500 homes. My wife said that she and the kids might have to evacuate. While thinking about the situation, I thought, "Here’s an excellent chance to practice what I preach. How could I look at the loss of my house as an ‘opportunity’? How could this be fun?" I actually came up with some answers. For one thing, we get a brand new house out of the deal. We could incorporate all the improvements we were thinking about (or weren’t thinking about). We wouldn’t have to clean out the garage, or our files, or closets. We would get rid of some art which we really didn’t like. We could experiment with living someplace else in town or elsewhere in the country for a while – or permanently. So, we potentially had two options: rebuild and have fun, or rebuild and whine. Fortunately, we didn’t have to choose either because the fire missed our house.

There are two senses of the word fun. The first is what most of us think of as fun: laughing and having a good time. How often do people laugh where you work? Fun and laughter are important. If people never laugh, something’s wrong. However, if people are always laughing, something’s wrong. But laughter and fun have to be built on a base of satisfaction, not used to mask over dissatisfaction. That is the second, deeper sense of fun that I am interested in, the sense creating satisfaction. Perhaps the title of the book should be Don’t Go to Work Unless It is a Source of Satisfaction. When a woman gives birth, you don’t ask, Did you have a good time? And you don’t have to ask, Do you get satisfaction from giving birth to your child? It is this deeper sense that I want to pursue primarily. You might want to pick a word more powerful to you than satisfaction: enjoyment, joy, fulfillment, peace.

I don’t know how work can always be fun, but I do know how it can be a source of satisfaction. The goal is to achieve both, but satisfaction is primary. We can create satisfaction in every situation, and we can create a good time or fun in many of them.

Chapter 3: TIME MASTERY FOR PROFESSIONALS

What is the difference between time management and time mastery? To illustrate, let’s take a brief look at the three historical stages in the development of the concept of time management.

Three Stages of Time Management

The first stage came at the end of the 19th century and has two names associated with it. The first is Frederick Jackson Taylor, the Father of Modern Management. Taylor recognized that the concept management could be abstracted from any profession and studied as a science itself.

In the early part of the 20th century Frank Gilbreth and his wife Lillian, started applying the concept of efficiency to factories and businesses. Frank began his adult life by entering MIT, but he didn’t like school, so he dropped out and became a bricklayer. Actually, he became an apprentice to bricklayers, so he had time to observe how they operated. He noticed a lot of wasted motion in what they did, so he started coming up with ideas. For example, he noticed they would have the bricks in a pile and would bend down to pick up every brick. So he suggested they build a little stand to hold the bricks, stacked with the right side facing the bricklayer. This eliminated several motions per brick. With this and other ideas, he was able to double the amount of bricks they could lay in the same amount of time. From that, he became an efficiency expert. He would go into factories and do time and motion studies: How many discreet motions do you go through? Can we eliminate some? How much time does each take? Can we reduce it?

That was the first stage of time management, the stage of efficiency. Efficiency means maximizing your resources and getting the most out of your resources. It looks at achieving what you achieve with the least amount of effort, time and money. It asks the question: How can we achieve greater output from the same or less input. They focused on how things were done.

The second stage came in the middle of the twentieth century. Peter Drucker and others shifted the emphasis of time management from efficiency to effectiveness – working smarter. Drucker makes a nice word play between the two words: efficiency means doing things right; effectiveness means doing the right things. Efficiency concerns itself with process – how you do things. Effectiveness, however, emphasizes end results – what you do. Are you working on what counts, on what produces the greatest results? Drucker says that good managers don’t do a lot of things. They focus on those few that produce the greatest results. Productivity comes from being both efficient and effective.

The third stage of time management is the stage of satisfaction. I like to think that Sanitate introduced that in the late 20th century. It is the stage that transcends time management and moves to time mastery. Both efficiency and effectiveness focus on achievement, on results in the external world. Mastery focuses on the internal world: Do you have a sense of satisfaction, peace, and joy in your use of time? After all, how much are you supposed to produce in life? What do you want your tombstone to say? He handled 50,000 cases in his day. She did 60,000 tax returns in her time. He responded to a million emails. He had a billion dollars in sales. Here is how much masters produce: the proper amount to give them satisfaction in work and in life.

Mastery

The sub-title of my first edition of this book was state-of-the-heart time management. When you are a time master, you measure success from within, not without. That requires looking at who you are, what your goals are, what your purpose in life is. That requires becoming conscious of your feelings and needs and tapping into your intuitions. For me, this has led me to using time to achieve satisfaction and not to worry so much about achievement. In fact, the only measure of time management I use right now is my own internal state of satisfaction. And, oddly enough, I am also actually achieving more now! It is not what I imagined when I was focusing primarily on achievement, but it is far more rewarding. This book is my attempt to share with you some of the thoughts that have led me along this path. Masters still act, but they do it from a centered place

Mastery also shifts the emphasis from action to attitude. In my workshops, I originally focused on actions – what you can do to better manage your time. However, every action is the outgrowth of a thought, belief or attitude. Telling people how to act is useless if a hidden attitude will prevent them from taking action. So I gradually shifted to helping people reexamine and redefine attitudes as well: How do we need to look at things? What attitudes do we need to change, so that proper actions can flow automatically? Or perhaps nothing needs to be done at all. We just need to look at the situation differently. Our attitudes are the motors that drive us. If we aren’t aware of them, then we are at their mercy. But if we can step back and see the attitude that creates the way we act, then we can get in control.

We are not conscious of many of our attitudes. It was surprising for me to find out in my early adulthood and after starting therapy that I was not the one who determined how I acted, but that I was at the effect of, or at the mercy of, a whole set of programmed reactions. It was only in stepping back and recognizing them that I could start to change or to accept and utilize some of them.

What is an attitude? An attitude is a combination of a thought and feeling. For example, you might have several tasks to do. The thought comes up: maybe I can’t handle all of these things. The feeling comes up: I’m afraid of failing to accomplish what I should. Combined they produce the attitude of resignation. The resulting action: I’ll just drift forward on this or that. But once you can identify the thought and feeling, you are in a place of freedom. You can shift your attitude by creating a new thought. In this case the thought might be: Either I will or I won’t finish them all. I will work on what’s important and do those things well. Your action then comes out of choice. This book focuses on attitudes, but it will also give you practical ideas and insights. Certainly the how to’s are valuable. They are available in much greater detail in my self-study program on CD, Time Management Workshop. The primary purpose of this book, however, is to have you look at how you manage your time and life, to have you understand the attitudes behind your actions, and to have you get in touch with your heart. Then your primary focus will be: what do I need to do to create satisfaction and fun in my work and in my life?

Chapter 4: HOW OLD DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO HAVE ENOUGH TIME?

One of the biggest complaints I hear in the time management workshops I teach is: I don’t have enough time. I once gave a mini-workshop for a group of about thirty people. Not being aware of what audience would show up, I was surprised to find that most of the participants were retired and probably over sixty-five. So I started the workshop by asking them to put themselves into one of three categories: I don’t have enough time, I have too much time or I have just the right amount of time. To my surprise, about twenty-five of them said they didn’t have enough time. One had too much time and the other four had the right amount of time. I posed the question to myself: How old do you have to be to have enough time?

I am reminded of a second incident. We used to live next door to Mrs. Smith who was close to ninety years old. She lived alone and would often complain, My upstairs is a mess. I have to get around to organizing things when I get the time. Mrs. Smith, you’re almost dead; don’t worry about it! I didn’t actually say this, but that was the thought that occurred to me.

Both of these incidents make me ask, How old does one have to be before you can say, ‘My life is fine; my use of time is fine; I have the perfect amount of time’? When does one get rid of guilt, the shoulds and have to’s, and have their life be exactly okay right now? Or, does one never reach that point? My answer, and the point of this book, of course, is that you can reach that point. Everyone can reach the point where he or she can say, My work and my life are fine right now; I have exactly the right amount of time.

It is not only possible to reach that state, you can do it right at this moment. It comes not by taking action but by shifting attitude. I see clearly that no matter what age or stage in life you’re at, if you don’t have this attitude shift you will never be satisfied with your use of time, with your work or with your life. A few years ago, I asked a cross-section of lawyers how many worked more hours than they really wanted to. Seventy-six percent of them said they did. Overall, the hundreds of lawyers I’ve surveyed average fifty hours of work per week. CPAs do a little better. They average forty-seven hours per week. Of course, I have never taught CPAs during the tax season, so their hours are considerably higher during that period of time.

Chapter 5: DON’T GO TO WORK UNLESS IT’S FUN: A NEW WORK ETHIC

Before looking at this new work ethic, let’s look at the old one. Why do people work so hard and so many hours? I am not referring not so much to those who earn hourly wages, but to professionals. Even those who are paid by the hour and do what the boss says have more choices than they often imagine. This will become truer as our population ages.

The meaning of the old work ethic is captured in the juxtaposition of the two words, work and ethic. It brings the concept of work into the realm of ethics or morality. Generally, people think of morality as a set of laws or principles to live by. Applying this to work, if you want to be good, if you want to do the right thing, you should work. In fact, the harder you work, the better you are. This ethic doesn’t necessarily stem from the principle that work is valuable, worthwhile and rewarding in itself, and therefore natural to man. It comes more from the Biblical viewpoint of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden with the punitive injunction, By the sweat of your brow shall you earn your bread. While writing this I decided to look at what the Bible actually says, and it’s worse than I remember! I am quoting here from the Good News Bible, produced by the American Bible Society, Gen. 3:17–19: Because of what you’ve done, the ground will be under a curse. You will have to work hard all of your life to make it produce enough food for you. It will produce weeds and thorns and you will have to eat wild plants. You will have to work hard and sweat to make the soil produce anything until you go back to the soil from which you are formed. Yikes! This is good news? So it’s the work is hard – life is hard – then you die scenario which has formed the work ethic. Paradise is where no one has to work. On this earth we are all cursed to work. Nobody works because they want to; we work because we have to! I was told, by the way, that other parts of the Bible express the ennobling nature of work as well.

Tied in to the old work ethic is the concept that if you work hard, you will be successful. If you are successful, you will have a lot of money or property. If you have a lot of money, that is proof that you are good and that God loves you. I would prefer to reinvent the work ethic in this way. Suppose the Bible had God telling this to Adam and Eve: You shall have the privilege of co-creation with me. The earth is abundant and fruitful. You will be able to make and produce things, to shepherd things, to discover things that will not only help to sustain your lives but will also make your lives more enjoyable and satisfying. Discovering and producing these things will give you great pleasure. You will be able to produce goods beyond your own needs and thus share goods with everyone else on the earth. So the new work ethic is to look at work from the scenario of joy, creation, satisfaction – and fun. It is to look at work as something I want to do, not something I have to do. Work can be and is a source of satisfaction in our lives if we choose to have it that way. If that is not true for you currently, you are not taking action on something that calls for action. Or, you have attitudes about work that are not accurate or that don’t serve you. The purpose of this book is to share actions you can take and new attitudes you can have so that you can say every morning, I can’t wait to get to work! I have discovered these in working with others over the years, and more so, in my journey of making my own work more fun and more satisfying. I hope to give you a new way to look at work and at life, so that you will naturally make those changes necessary to have your work – and life – become a great source of satisfaction for you.

Chapter 6: WHAT PERCENT OF THE AMERICAN WORKFORCE DO NOT GET SATISFACTION FROM THEIR WORK?

I ask people at my workshops to estimate what percent of the American workforce do not get satisfaction from their work. In other words, what percent are just working to make a living and get no real satisfaction from what they are doing? The average answer I get is 66%! Can this be true – two thirds of us don’t find our work a source of satisfaction for us? It is a sad indictment for one of two reasons. First, what if the people I surveyed are accurate in their assessment of how many people are dissatisfied? What we end up with is one of the richest, most productive countries on earth with one of the highest standards of living where the majority of people don’t get satisfaction from work. The second possibility is that most Americans really do get satisfaction, but everyone walks around thinking that they don’t. That is a disempowering thought in itself. If most people are satisfied in their work but we go around thinking we aren’t, then we act as if it is so and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Perhaps I get the 66% number for dissatisfaction because I have been working primarily with two professions – lawyers and accountants. Maybe they are just two miserable professions and respondents think that since they are so miserable, everybody must be! But I don’t think so. These are two of the most highly respected and compensated professions around, and they have contact with a cross-section of America.

The question I have been asking is: What percent of the American workforce do not get satisfaction from their work? It is not: Are you satisfied in your work? That is a complicated question. First, there is a distinction between your work and your job. We might like the work we do but not the particular job we are in right now. And that may be