Don’t Call It Work

When the brain hears the word work, it wants to protect us. Work means loss of energy, so it keeps us from it as best it can.

In the Middle Ages, people had a pragmatic relationship with work. They worked to live. What needed to be done to have food was done. Furthermore, work was considered dispensable. Those who worked hard to achieve prosperity were looked upon with suspicion. The striving for power and wealth was deemed to be sinful.

All this changed fundamentally when Martin Luther declared work as a calling and laziness as sin. From then on, work was something that one had to do if one wanted to be seen as a useful person. Work should not be a pleasure, for pleasure did not make one popular with God.

Since then, over many generations, the conviction that work is unpleasant has become established. Today we work five days a week and live only for the weekend. The time we work is not perceived by many as life at all.

Another reason why work seems so unattractive to us is that we usually do not work for ourselves but others. The meaning of our work is hardly visible to us today. Anyone who produces any part in a factory that is later built into something else does not longer feel connected to the final product. The division of labor, which made our industrial revolution possible, has also alienated us from work.

Our brain is trained to associate work with stress and drudgery. Therefore, it helps us to avoid work wherever possible. If employees today hardly ever work four hours in the office out of eight hours, this is due to the avoidance strategies that our brain provides us with. We invest more time and energy in avoiding or faking work instead of actually doing it.

Entrepreneurs, in turn, do everything to find employees who have a good work ethic. They know that nobody sees the meaning of life in frying burgers or filling out tables as perfectly as possible. A good work ethic is based on the entrepreneurs’ conception, therefore on characteristics such as discipline, sense of duty, and staying power. Consequently, they look for coworkers who do the work well, although it means nothing to them.

But they look in the wrong direction. There are humans in each job who seem to burn for what they do. Their work is not a bit more meaningful or important than that of their colleagues, but they seem to enjoy it. How can that be a? Where do you find such people? Or, perhaps more importantly, how do I become such a person?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we enjoyed the work? Sure, our employer would only benefit the more from our workforce and maybe drive an even fatter car, but that wouldn’t be a reason why we should wish to enjoy our work. It is pure self-interest to have fun at work. Nobody wants to be bored and frustrated all day long doing a job they have no control over.

If we could find a way to see our work as fun, a large part of our lives would suddenly become meaningful and comfortable again. Work ethics must be trained to be able to work well. But who needs a fun ethic? We do not have to force ourselves to have fun. We can never get enough of it.

So if we have to work to live, we should at least prevent that we live only to work. Above all, we should stop hating our work because we work for someone else. If it really pisses us off, then we should quit and start our own business. This is the best tip I have. But for everyone else, it’s healthier to turn your work into an adventure playground.

Make everything part of a big, exciting game

There are people who spend many hours every day in simulated worlds and work their way up level by level. There are points and rewards for all kinds of things. You can get points for harvesting fields, defeating armies, or building schools. Why do we like to spend so much time in such simulated worlds? Because they provide us with measurable results for our efforts and thus activate the reward center in our brain.

The same tasks that we perform with joy and ambition in the game are boring in real life. Why? Because our daily chores seem to be only fragments of an unmanageable mountain of duties. Completing them does not make our lives noticeably better.

How much better is our life after we have mopped the floor, made a spreadsheet, or fried ten burgers? It is impossible to say if we don’t have a system to measure our progress or even to name it.

If everything in our life were a game where we get points, we would approach many everyday things with more enthusiasm.

But to make this possible, we need rules of the game to evaluate our progress.

Here is an example: Do you have to finish an Excel spreadsheet by noon? Don’t call it work, but see it as part of your life’s game. Decide how many points you would give yourself for completing the task and get those points.

This may seem bland, but it can be a significant turning point in your life. Because just as you can give yourself points for creating this table, you can give yourself points for absolutely anything. You can give yourself points for brushing your teeth, for doing the dishes, for doing your tax return, and of course, for every task, you have to do on the job.

The first step: Develop your scorecard

Of course, you cannot decide spontaneously every time you do something how many points you should give yourself for it. You need a plan.

It’s best to sit down at the weekend or in the evening with pen and paper and write down everything you have to do in your life again and again. Be specific. For example, don’t write “Clean the apartment,” but divide the task into parts like “Clean the sink,” “Take out the garbage,” or “Clean one window.”

Don’t stop until you really can’t think of anything else. Then you take your job. Write down your recurring tasks here as well. Think more abstractly and ask yourself how you can quantify spontaneous tasks. If your boss tells you tomorrow that you should create a budget, but creating budgets is not a recurring task for you, it doesn’t make sense to add the item “Create budget” to your list.

Instead, write, for example: “Work per minute on special projects.” In this way, you can immediately quantify and reward any unusual task with points.

At the end of this process, you will have a fairly extensive list in front of you. Now you have to decide which of these numerous tasks should be worth exactly one point. For example, I give myself a point for clearing out the dishwasher.

Now you have a reference with which you can judge all the other tasks on your list.

If cleaning the dishwasher is worth one point, for example, mopping a room is worth five points to me. This is not necessarily a tribute to the additional time spent, but above all, to the efficiency.

Moreover, the less I like a task, the more points I give myself for it. This motivates me to do the unpleasant things I would otherwise ignore.

As soon as you have finished your list, the game of your life can begin.

From now on, all you have to do is write down what you did during the day, and in the evening, you can check off these tasks in your table and calculate your points.

You will quickly realize that you want to exceed this value over and over again. The reward principle of video games is suddenly active in your everyday life. Every day you want to break your high score from the day before and actively look for things you can do today to replenish your score further.

Summary

Work is only a burden if we call it work.

Gamifying everyday tasks helps to develop fun in the usually dull things of everyday life. It works the same way at the job.

By turning work into a game where you can earn points, work takes away much of its terror.

If you don’t want your work to ruin your life, don’t call it work anymore, but make it a game.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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