Welcome back! It's been a while for me and one of my friends this weekend wondered if the reason I haven't posted in a while was because I've been working too much and she may very well have a point (thanks for the motivation, Betsy). Well I wanted to continue the conversation about work and life and talk about something I see increasingly for me and with others the more I talk to people about their work.
I think that people sometimes talk about their dream job and some people actually get their dream job. I was talking to my friend Ben Horrigan the other week and he has just finished Physician's Assistant School and he got a job in orthopedics at Union Memorial Sports Medicine. When I was talking to Ben about this, he literally said, "This is my dream job". I'm really happy for Ben, and proud of him too - he knew what he wanted to do, studied hard in school, and pursued his dreams. Now I don't know any definite statistics, but I'd guess that for if polled, maybe less than 20% of people would say that they are working in their dream job. Maybe even less that 10%, I don't know.
What I do know is that the way I got into my career path/field of work was nothing like the way Ben did it. In college I started studying music education, then changed my major to psychology, then narrowed that to specialize in clinical psychology and finished with that. Then I got my first job right out of college, worked that full time and started grad school part time. My first job, led to another job, which led to yet another job - all with the same organization. My decision-making process was quite different than following my dreams. I knew what I was interested in, and just looked at different opportunities that presented themselves along the way. Although I feel like I am quite driven at work, in a lot of ways I feel that when I was navigating career decisions, the career path choose me, not the other way around. That's not to say that I don't really like my job, because I really do. I just don't really think I planned out my dream and navigated towards that.
But do people need to work their dream job? When I talk to my wife, Kate about this her obvious "dream job" would be to work at Charm City Cakes, the popular bakery that was featured on the show Ace of Cakes on the Food Network. Kate loves baking and decorating cakes and she loved that show even more. In the last couple years, Kate has made and decorated a bunch of cakes for professional parties, birthday parties, and even weddings - and the cakes look and taste amazing! It's neat to see how she has been able to fulfill that "dream job" interest while still working a "regular" job that she has interest in as well. All this to say that not everyone has to work in their dream job in order to do what they are passionate about.
What do you think?
ps. if people are having trouble commenting in the blogger format, let me know.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
Mixing work and home
Do you take work home? Do you check your work email in the evening and on the weekends? That's such a workaholic thing to do right? What about calls or emails from people at work expecting responses during non-work hours? What defines your work time and your non-work time?
This is such an interesting topic and changing a lot lately with the work world. One of the books I recently read and liked a ton was, "The Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World" by Vince Poscente. (Random sidebar: so the book is pretty short and is about speed, but it took me a while to finish, not because it was boring, but because I'm a slow reader - I just thought that was ironic given the title). In this book, it talks about the increasing blur between work and home. The book references the origin of the location of work - going back to when society shifted from agricultural to industrial. What happened was workers moved from being on the farm (living where you work/working where you live) to working in factories. So, once that shift happened, work was defined by where you were - if you're at the factory, you're at work, if you're home you're at home. Location was everything, it was impossible to work at the factory if you were at home.
So, clearly a lot has changed since then. I actually saw this progress through observing my dad's career. When I was a kid, my dad was a plant manager at a textile company in Providence, RI and much like the reference above, there really was no way for him to take work home and computers weren't really used a lot (this was before the days of internet, laptops, and smart phones). Later in his career, he work in the title field (doing real estate title searches as a part of the property transaction process). Doing this type of work, there was a ton of homework - finishing up the day's work and prepping for the next day utilizing technology in a way that was never possible in his previous job 15 years earlier.
It's kind of obvious that technology advances make us more accessible to our work. We can leave work, but still get called or emailed anytime and any place on our smartphone and get roped back into work. We can do video conference meetings to anywhere in the world. I'm sure there are a lot of other cool technology advances and communication methods that I don't know about or don't use in my field. Ultimately, all these things just create an increase in ways for our work to bleed into our home life.
So, how does this stuff affect you and your work and/or life? Why is that that we feel loyal and dedicated when we take care of work at home, but feel guilty taking a personal call at work? Am I the only one who feels that way? Let's talk about it. How does the mix of work and home take effect in your life?
This is such an interesting topic and changing a lot lately with the work world. One of the books I recently read and liked a ton was, "The Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World" by Vince Poscente. (Random sidebar: so the book is pretty short and is about speed, but it took me a while to finish, not because it was boring, but because I'm a slow reader - I just thought that was ironic given the title). In this book, it talks about the increasing blur between work and home. The book references the origin of the location of work - going back to when society shifted from agricultural to industrial. What happened was workers moved from being on the farm (living where you work/working where you live) to working in factories. So, once that shift happened, work was defined by where you were - if you're at the factory, you're at work, if you're home you're at home. Location was everything, it was impossible to work at the factory if you were at home.
So, clearly a lot has changed since then. I actually saw this progress through observing my dad's career. When I was a kid, my dad was a plant manager at a textile company in Providence, RI and much like the reference above, there really was no way for him to take work home and computers weren't really used a lot (this was before the days of internet, laptops, and smart phones). Later in his career, he work in the title field (doing real estate title searches as a part of the property transaction process). Doing this type of work, there was a ton of homework - finishing up the day's work and prepping for the next day utilizing technology in a way that was never possible in his previous job 15 years earlier.
It's kind of obvious that technology advances make us more accessible to our work. We can leave work, but still get called or emailed anytime and any place on our smartphone and get roped back into work. We can do video conference meetings to anywhere in the world. I'm sure there are a lot of other cool technology advances and communication methods that I don't know about or don't use in my field. Ultimately, all these things just create an increase in ways for our work to bleed into our home life.
So, how does this stuff affect you and your work and/or life? Why is that that we feel loyal and dedicated when we take care of work at home, but feel guilty taking a personal call at work? Am I the only one who feels that way? Let's talk about it. How does the mix of work and home take effect in your life?
Saturday, July 23, 2011
The value of work
What is work? Why do we do it? What does it do for us? What should it do for us?
Work is defined as: activity in which one exerts strength or faculties to do or perform something. Some people work with their hands doing physical labor. Others do very non-physical work. Whether it's physical or not, the exertion of energy is the key foundation of work.
Have you ever heard someone say, "If it were fun, they wouldn't call it work"? It is a question that makes us wonder, is enjoying your work a right? Even though work requires exertion, do we deserve to like have fun while we are exerting? Should work make us happy or make us tired? Or both?
A lot of people get into careers to directly help other people such as doctors, nurses, therapists, teachers, firefighters, and social workers (to name a few). Working in these professions (and others like them) provides some satisfaction and enjoyment from making an impact in people's lives. Other professionals get satisfaction from other components of work (sales, productivity, business development, career advancement, or just plain old money). Most people do the work they do for more than one of those reasons, but prioritize things differently. Some people could care less what they do, as long as they make a lot of money or have a comfortable life. Others care nothing about money and just passionately work to make an impact in others lives. And most of us are somewhere in between those two extremes.
I've sometimes joked with friends about trying to find a way to simplify life that would allow us to not have to work or be able to live more and work less, but that joke usually ends up with the realization that unless Kate and I want to live in a friend/family/commune, I've got to keep doing what I'm doing now. I've even read about downshifting, which is a way of life that attempts to simplify, de-materialize, and slow down your life, usually resulting in a decreased need to work as much. This approach seems radical at first, but I think there is definitely something to be said about examining our work-and-spend cycle of living. This type of living/thinking is hard because we live in a world that almost demands that we be concerned about making money, which drives us to work.
I think it's pretty hard to work and not think about money and finances. So, for me it's hard not to think about work as a means to money and let that be my sole motivation. My personal goal is to do a little less worrying about the financial aspect of work and focus more on the people I am helping (patients, co-workers, management) and the life I live beyond my work.
I've sometimes joked with friends about trying to find a way to simplify life that would allow us to not have to work or be able to live more and work less, but that joke usually ends up with the realization that unless Kate and I want to live in a friend/family/commune, I've got to keep doing what I'm doing now. I've even read about downshifting, which is a way of life that attempts to simplify, de-materialize, and slow down your life, usually resulting in a decreased need to work as much. This approach seems radical at first, but I think there is definitely something to be said about examining our work-and-spend cycle of living. This type of living/thinking is hard because we live in a world that almost demands that we be concerned about making money, which drives us to work.
I think it's pretty hard to work and not think about money and finances. So, for me it's hard not to think about work as a means to money and let that be my sole motivation. My personal goal is to do a little less worrying about the financial aspect of work and focus more on the people I am helping (patients, co-workers, management) and the life I live beyond my work.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Workaholic
In my first (non-baseball related) blog posting, let me just say that I have no idea what I'm doing or why I'm doing this. I know blogs are "so 2003", but even though I use Email, Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and other online communication forms, I just can't cram what I say into 140 characters all the time.
So, what is this all about? Work/Life? Who wants to read online about work, right? I don't know, probably not many people, right. But I looked and a LOT of people blog about work...sometimes too much or in too much detail. I will try to avoid any entries describing anything related to this most recent work-related movie (which looks hilarious, by the way). As I picture it, the common theme of my blog entries will be the relationship between work and life.
I work a lot. I "put in" on average 45-50 hours a week. For someone who is not managing a hedge fund in Manhattan, that's a lot I think. I think about work a lot, even when I am not at work. I've been called a workaholic before by friends and family (jokingly sometimes, seriously other times). I can tell when I'm really "addicted to work" when my response is, "I can stop working this much whenever I want" (only a slight variation of the alcoholic's response, "I can quit drinking whenever I want". Thankfully my family and friends are patient with me and things work out (and no intervention has had to be staged yet).
No, but all joking aside, there is something fascinating about work to me, and to all of us. For some reason, one of the first things we ask people after we are introduced to them is "what do you do?" I do this all the time. In small talk situations I'm sometimes more interested in talking to people about their work than I am about the other areas of their life (family, community, spirituality/religion, hobbies, etc.).
If you look at work from a time/mathematical standpoint, think about how much time you spend at work and how much time you spend not at work. There are 168 hours in each week. If you sleep 8 hours a night (does anyone really get 8 hours?), you can subtract 56 hours, which brings you down to 112 hours. If you work the "standard" 40 hours a week, that really only leaves you with 72 hours left to "play" with. If you work 50 hours a week, you're spending just under half your waking hours at work. A lot of people continue to be "connected" to work (through email, phone, text messages, and other ways even when they are not "at work". This trend leads to the blurring between work and personal/home time. I don't thing this trend is going away either, as there are only more and more ways to stay connected and tied to work.
Bottom line, I and I think most of us spend a lot of time at work, thinking about work, and connected to work. So, there has got to be something to this whole work/life thing. That's why I want to talk start talking about it. Let me know what you think about all this.
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