Ask AltoTRY · 10 MIN
Real Cost of Work
TAIU
Count the hours, not only the salary.
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Tool 46 · Develop yourself
What am I paying in health, time and relationships?
A guided 18 to 22 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. This exercise does not assume the cost is too high, does not score your balance and gives no medical or financial advice.
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.
What it costs
The real bill
Add up what this job takes in health, time and relationships.
Where this often ends up: The cost of this job written out, including the parts nobody bills you for.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around twenty minutes
Accepted and not
Which costs you accept
Separate the costs you would pay again from the ones you would not.
Where this often ends up: A clear line between what you accept and what you do not.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around thirty minutes
The negotiation
One thing worth asking for
Work out what you could ask for, and whether now is the time to ask it.
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
Who else in your house is paying for this job?
They will have a clear answer and it will be more specific than yours.
Most bad arrangements were fair once. Find the drift before you decide the whole thing is wrong.
What you'll look at
- 01The hours
- 02What it takes
- 03What it returns
- 04What has changed
A note from Mark
The thing about a bad exchange is that nobody agrees to it. It arrives an hour at a time and the terms change without anybody proposing a change. Two years later you are working a different job on the same contract.
I would count the hours properly before anything else, and I mean the invisible ones. The commute, the phone at nine, the Saturday morning that is written off because of the week. People are routinely surprised by their own number.
But I would be just as strict about the return. Most people who arrive at this question have come to complain. If you let them, they will describe a job that gives them nothing. That is almost never true. The security, the money, the thing they are learning, the network they have built. Those are real and they belong on the page.
Read my full view ↓
And I would ask who else is paying, because the cost frequently lands on somebody who is not in the room. Ask them. Their answer is usually more accurate than yours and considerably shorter.
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
The real hours
02
Both sides of the exchange
03
The drift
04
One renegotiation
+
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 are giving
- 03What you are getting
- 04What the exchange actually is
- 05Who else is paying
- 06What has changed
- 07What is recoverable and what is not
- 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
The real hours, honestly counted.
02 · Test it
Count last week honestly, including the phone and the commute.
See more ↓
What I would do
- 01
Count the real hours before anything else, including recovery time.
- 02
Write the return honestly. It is usually larger than it feels on a bad week.
- 03
Find the drift. Almost every exchange has some.
- 04
Separate what comes back with rest from what does not.
- 05
Pick one term to renegotiate rather than the whole arrangement.
Test it
- 01
How many hours was it when you started, and how many is it now?
- 02
What would you miss within a fortnight if it stopped?
- 03
Who else in your house is paying for this job?
The alternative
The expected conclusion is that the job costs too much. Two alternatives are frequently stronger. The exchange may have been fair when it was struck and has simply drifted, in which case the problem is a renegotiation rather than a resignation and the same job at the original terms would be entirely acceptable. Or the cost may be genuinely high and genuinely worth it for a defined period, which is a real answer as long as the period is defined and somebody is watching the end date. Occasionally the finding is that the money is doing much more work in this arrangement than the user wants to admit.
Think about this
- The hours you actually work, including the invisible ones.
- What the week takes out of you by Thursday.
- What the job gives you that you would miss immediately.
- What has changed in the last two years without being agreed.
- Who else in your life is paying part of this.
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
Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman
Read this if your problem isn't knowing what matters. Your problem is trying to make everything matter at once.
Read more ↗
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READ · BOOK
The Burnout Challenge
Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
Forty years of research arguing that burnout is a mismatch between a person and the conditions they work in, not a deficiency in the person. Worth the time if you are about to redesign your entire life on the strength of feeling depleted. The two are easy to confuse. The remedies are not remotely the same.
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
Should I leave
If the exchange no longer makes sense at any price
Before you start
Reading, if you would rather understand the question first.
Further thinking
Long Working Hours and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke
Mika Kivimäki and colleagues
The Productivity of Working Hours
John Pencavel
The Burnout Challenge
Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
See the thinking ↓
Article
Long Working Hours and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke
Mika Kivimäki and colleagues
A meta analysis across more than half a million people. It puts a number on something usually discussed as a feeling.
Article
The Productivity of Working Hours
John Pencavel
Output per hour falls sharply after a threshold, so the extra hours are frequently bought at full price and delivered at a discount.
Book
The Burnout Challenge
Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
Forty years of research arguing that burnout is a mismatch between a person and the conditions they work in, not a deficiency in the person. Worth the time if you are about to redesign your entire life on the strength of feeling depleted. The two are easy to confuse. The remedies are not remotely the same.
Book
Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman
The title comes from a simple observation. An average human life is surprisingly short when expressed in weeks. Burkeman challenges the idea that becoming more productive will eventually create enough time for everything. It won't.