Work isn’t all that bad; it just takes a little time off to realise there is worse - Times Online

Work isn’t all that bad; it just takes a little time off to realise there is worse - Times Online

Work isn’t all that bad; it just takes a little time off to realise there is worse (Holiday/Vacation?; Watching Television?)

From The Time (Times Online UK)
February 3, 2009
Work isn’t all that bad; it just takes a little time off to realise there is worse
Sathnam Sanghera: Business life

Excerpts:

Americans survive because, ultimately, holidays aren’t that great and work is more fun than fun. And there are two factors behind my sudden belief in the meaningfulness of work, the first being that this column has suddenly become really quite hard to write.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, written by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly

Elegantly written, Csikszentmihalyi merges research from the fields as diverse as consciousness, personal psychology and sociology in an original way and backs up his arguments with experiments he has conducted himself. And the experiment most relevant to the question of American workaholism involved Csikszentmihalyi asking more than a hundred men and women working full time in a variety of occupations to wear an electronic pager for one week and respond at random points to bleeps asking how they felt.

The results found that about half the time people were working they were confronting above-average challenges, using above-average skills and feeling happier, more cheerful, stronger, more creative and satisfied. In contrast, when engaged in leisure activities such as watching TV and “having friends over”, the corresponding figure was only 18 per cent and people typically reported feeling passive, weak, dull and dissatisfied. However, despite this, when these respondents were asked “Do you wish you had been doing something else?”, they said they wished they were doing something else to a much greater extent when working than when at leisure.

In other words, even though people generally find work rewarding and satisfying and leisure much less so, given the choice they would work less. Csikszentmihalyi calls this “the work paradox” and suggests the contradiction can be explained by a number of things, not least the fact that while people generally find work satisfying and rewarding, they “cannot stand a high level of challenge all the time”.

However, my preferred explanation is his assertion that when it comes to work, people do not heed the evidence of their senses. Basically, we are irrational on the topic of work and leisure. Why? Because we have been brainwashed into thinking of work as tedious and punishing, when it really isn’t.

Read full article: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/columnists/article5645005.ece

***********************************************************************
This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.