What Does it Mean to Work Hard?
30th November 2010
Some interesting thoughts on work and non-work.
The point is, crank-widget work is easy to define and measure in objective terms. Information work is different. Drucker offered the correct, but mostly useless idea that part of information work is defining the work to begin with, which makes it very ambiguous. Call it define-and-do work.
But when you are doing define-and-do Druckerian work, it is basically impossible to decouple definition from execution a priori in useful ways (“my job is to define my job and do it” — sounds like a GNU recursive acronym, doesn’t it?). “Work” is whatever the hell you need to do to “get the job done.” A non-constructive definition.
By the same standard, you sometimes need a vacation to recover from a vacation if the original vacation involved meeting family expectations. I am sure that’s especially true for many Americans who are returning after stressful family weekends. That’s a “work” vacation because between the turkey and the pumpkin pie, you may have had to justify your career/life to your Dad, and the reaction mattered. If this is true for you, then for better or worse, your Dad is your customer for a product you are creating called “my life.”