Ask AltoTRY · 10 MIN
What Is Work For?
TAIU
Name what this job is actually being asked to provide.
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Tool 45 · Develop yourself
Does this work need to mean more than it does?
A guided 16 to 20 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. This exercise does not assume you need purpose from a job, and it does not talk you out of wanting it either.
GUIDES
You have named it. Now spend some time on it.
Each Guide gives you a clear way to look at one subject in your own time. Choose where to begin. You do not need to work through everything.
Dignity, pay and treatment
What this work is actually giving you
Look at what this job gives you and what it takes, in plain terms.
Where this often ends up: An honest account of what the work provides and what it costs.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around twenty minutes
What it has to mean
How much meaning it has to carry
Work out how much of your life's meaning this job is being asked to hold.
Where this often ends up: Your own view of what work is for, tested against the rest of your life.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around thirty minutes
What needs changing
What would have to change
Decide whether anything genuinely needs changing here, or whether this is sound as it is.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around twenty minutes
This Guide is free, like everything else in The Clearing.
You can see what it covers before you begin.
Start this Guide
Whose idea of a career are you failing?
If the standard came from somebody else, you are allowed to put it down without replacing it with anything.
A job that pays you properly and leaves you enough of yourself is not a compromise. For most of history it was the whole ambition.
What you'll look at
- 01An ordinary day
- 02What you expect
- 03What it gives you
- 04The rest of your life
A note from Mark
I do not believe everybody needs to love their work. That idea has done a lot of damage. Mostly it harms people whose jobs are perfectly decent. They have been persuaded they are underachieving just by holding one.
What I would want to know is what work is for in your life. Money and hours, obviously. But also whether you are treated like an adult, whether you are any good at it, whether there is anybody there you like, and what state you are in when you walk through the door at the end of it. Those are the things that actually determine whether a job is bearable.
Read my full view ↓
The trap is when a thin week gets blamed on the job. If there is nothing much in the evenings and the weekends have gone quiet, work becomes the only thing big enough to be at fault. Changing employer does nothing for that, and people find out at considerable expense.
None of which excuses a bad job. Pay you cannot live on, contempt from a manager, hours that wreck your health. Those are not expectation problems and no amount of perspective fixes them.
What you'll get
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
Expectation against provision
02
Where the gap sits
03
Non-negotiables
04
Whether to change anything
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02What you expect work to provide
- 03What it actually provides
- 04Where the gap is
- 05What could be met elsewhere
- 06What is actually non negotiable
- 07Life outside work
- 08The rival reading
- 09What deserves protecting
- 10The credible alternative
- 11What this exercise cannot decide
- 12What remains unresolved
- 13Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
At the end, the conversation asks how Work and purpose feels for you right now, in your own words. It also asks what, if anything, would feel different. Nothing changes on your tree unless you say it changes.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- How you described it
- What would feel different
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
What you actually need work to provide.
02 · Test it
Describe your job to somebody without using the word just.
See more ↓
What I would do
- 01
Separate what you expect from what you were taught to expect.
- 02
List what the job actually provides before you list what it lacks.
- 03
Notice whether the flatness is in the job or in the week.
- 04
Hold the line on pay, safety and being treated decently.
- 05
Allow the answer to be that it is a job and that is fine.
Test it
- 01
What do you actually need work to give you?
- 02
Whose idea of a career are you measuring yourself against?
- 03
If your week outside work were fuller, would this job still be the problem?
The alternative
The expected conclusion is that the work is not enough. Two alternatives are often stronger. The expectation may be borrowed rather than yours, absorbed from parents, a degree course or fifteen years of people describing their jobs as journeys, and it can be put down. Or the dissatisfaction may not be about the job at all. Where the rest of the week is thin, work is the only structure available to hold the disappointment, and it will keep holding it in the next job too. Sometimes the finding is that the job is decent, the expectation is fair and the honest answer is that nothing needs to change.
Think about this
- What an ordinary Tuesday is actually like.
- What you were told a career is supposed to feel like.
- What work gives you beyond the money.
- What is in your life outside work at the moment.
- What you would not accept under any circumstances.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Put this into practice
READ · BOOK
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
Graeber on work that the person doing it privately believes is pointless. Argumentative and overstated in places, and still the sharpest account of a particular modern misery.
Read more ↗
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READ · ARTICLE
One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?
Frederick Herzberg
Herzberg argues that what makes work tolerable and what makes it satisfying are two different lists. Fixing the first will not deliver the second.
Read more ↗
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Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.
Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
What is this job actually costing me
If the question is what you are paying for the arrangement
Before you start
Reading, if you would rather understand the question first.
Further thinking
Jobs, Careers and Callings: People's Relations to Their Work
Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues
Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved
Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
See the thinking ↓
Article
Jobs, Careers and Callings: People's Relations to Their Work
Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues
The study that found people in identical roles describe their work as a job, a career or a calling in roughly equal thirds. None of the three is the correct answer.
Article
Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved
Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers
Two researchers who had published opposite findings sat down together to work out who was right. The answer was both, in different populations: for most people happiness continues to rise with income, while for an unhappy minority it flattens once real hardship is behind them. It is the most honest available answer to the question of whether more money would help, and it refuses to give you a slogan in either direction.
Book
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
Graeber on work that the person doing it privately believes is pointless. Argumentative and overstated in places, and still the sharpest account of a particular modern misery.
Article
Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work
Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton
Evidence that people reshape the same job substantially without changing the job title. Worth reading before concluding the only route is out.