On Work

"Jobs are not big enough for people. It's not just the assembly line worker whose job is too small for his spirit, you know?  –Nora Walker, editor in Stud Terkel's Working

[onwork]

“Two career consultants and an economist said they’ve observed a shift in what Americans are seeking from their work over the past year. “We’ve been through a period of so much stress and uncertainty, and it’s made people really pause and consider what they want their lives to look like as things move back toward normal,” Alison Green, a work advice columnist who runs the blog Ask a Manager, wrote in an email to the PBS NewsHour. Green said she’s received letters from people hoping to find new, more flexible jobs in the same field, or rethinking their careers entirely.” (Courtney Vinopal)

Keep reading at PBS...

[onwork]

'People want a family, a social life': the part-time working revolution

From doctors to teachers, millennials to older women, more than half of us now work flexibly. But is it a lifestyle choice, or a way to deal with increasing stress?

“But while part-time work remains the path to a more relaxed life for many, it can have a darker side. If it’s functioning as a safety valve, allowing some people to hang on to jobs they love even when the pressure gets too much, that may be a practical solution for individuals. But could it be masking an underlying problem of too few people struggling with too much work, while others don’t have anything like enough?”

[newyorker]

Bridget Jones and the Millennial Workplace

Today, “Bridget Jones” needn’t be limited to the confines of its chick-lit designation. The notion that the equations of life do not add up is still a particular problem for women of all ages, but many young people, no matter their gender, will find some of Bridget’s story familiar. 

Read more on newyorker.com.

[onwork]

 On becoming a barber after you’ve been a musician. Stephen Mason, from Jars of Clay, on vocation and asking questions like, Who am I and where am I going?

[onwork]

The planner has made me aware of how much of my time gets eaten up by paid writing tasks — as opposed to the ones I feel passionate about but that won’t necessarily lead to much income. Quotes on passion and happiness grace the pages of my new planner, suggesting strongly that I should prioritize what I love above all else. If these projects mattered to me, my planner lectures, I would carve out the time. Mostly the quotes just wear on my nerves. And none of them explain how my passion will pay for daycare. Strange.

Kelly J. Baker, “The Flaws of ‘Do What You Love;” at Chronicle Vitae

Read the rest of her essay here.

[onwork]

When we [introverts] imagine our ideal workplace, it looks more like a library full of quiet rooms and isolated carrels than the ball-pit and bullpen situation start-ups are currently obsessed with. As introverts, we may be outnumbered by extroverts at start-ups. According to [Marti] Laney, “The introvert is pressured daily, almost from the moment of awakening, to respond and conform to the outer world.” This need to conform can be tiring. But we promise, with just a few tweaks in the workplace, you could make us very happy.

“An Illustrated Guide to Introverts in a Start-Up“ by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West, published at QuietRev.com

[onwork]

If You're Not Getting Job Interviews, Read This

What do you do when you send out dozens of resumes or fill out endless online applications and you never hear anything back? Liz Ryan explains

I like the human scale of this approach.

[onwork]

What do you want to be when you grow up?

“You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.” ~ Fred Rogers

What do you want to be when you grow up is an old question, but it was on my mind last week when a few experiences converged in a single day.

Read more from Teri Case as she ponders this ever-important question.

[onwork]

Want to Be a Servant? Dress Like One.

How my life uniform helped me to consider the needs of others above my own.

I’ve experimented with having a capsule wardrobe, but this is an approach I hadn’t thought about before. It takes wardrobe simplification to a whole new level. A much deeper level. In this piece by Alfred Cedeño, he quotes his cousin Jason as saying that his life uniform is “a daily reminder that the life I live is the work I do.“

[onwork]

Finding Livelihood is not at all common, it is beyond uncommon. It is not just good. It is nothing short of extraordinary and I doubt if you have ever read a book quite like it. It is wise, thoughtful, literary, poetic, full of stories - stories that are often exceptionally mundane but made exceptionally meaningful by Nancy Nordenson's extraordinary prose.

Byron Borger, Hearts & Minds Books; Booknotes Column – Invisibles: Celebrating the Unsung Heroes of the Workplace (David Zweig) AND Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure (Nancy Nordenson)

[onwork]

No, it’s not you: why ‘wellness’ isn’t the answer to overwork

Zoë Krupka PhD Student Faculty of Health Sciences, La Trobe University

From The Conversation

“No amount of multivitamins, yoga, meditation, sweaty exercise, superfoods or extreme time management, as brilliant as all these things can be, is going to save us from the effects of too much work. This is not something we can adapt to. Not something we need to adjust the rest of our lives around. It is not possible and it’s unethical to pretend otherwise. Like a low-flying plane, the insidious culture of overwork is deafening and the only way we can really feel better is if we can find a way to make it stop.”

Keep reading...

[onwork]

Is it true that we ARE what we DO?

Paid. Unpaid. On the books. Under the table. Love it. Hate it. Work not only takes up much of our lifetime and our life energy, it can come to define our whole identity.

A sensitive reflection on work by my friend Carrie Ann Lahain.

[onwork]

Work and its Discontents A Review of Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure Nancy Nordenson Paperback: Kalos Press, 2015 Buy

From this review of my new book Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure today by David Clark at The Englewood Review of Books:

“Finding Livelihood does seek ‘thin places’ within our daily work but also searches for ‘thicker truths.’ By a thicker truth, I mean Nordenson seeks a knowing that looks through the shards of our life’s facts and rendered experience to locate a larger coherence. By investigating the brokenness inherent in our current work lives, the author imagines the contours and possibilities of ‘work that delights.’ Nordenson eschews easy certainties, the bromides found in so much of current vocational advice.”

[onwork]

The Human Shape of Work: Studies in the Sociology of Occupations edited by Peter Berger.

This book was published in 1964. I first read it a couple years ago but have taken it out again for a re-read. It addresses “the problem of work” by studying five occupations in depth: the apartment-building janitor, the assembly-line worker, the advertising man (think: Don Draper), and the business executive. In his concluding editorial chapter, Berger writes: “The social-psychological aspect of work concerns above all what the monastics call ‘formation,’ that is, the shaping of character in accordance with the demands of vocation.” I think this is so true. Many books are written about how our work shapes the world; I find myself asking a smaller question: how does our work shape us? Or asked another way, what role does our work play in our own formation?

[onwork]

Listen to a conversation about my new book, Finding Livelihood. Here’s an excerpt from the conversation:

“At that time [of my husband’s job loss] and the time that followed, I read much of what other people had to say about work and started to feel like we were the only ones wrestling with it, the only ones whose working lives didn't conform to the standards set forth by the experts. I felt like work is big and hard, even in the best of circumstances, yet the messages from these other sources suggest that, oh you’d only apply these principles it would be easier, or if your husband would take a quiz to find what his perfect job might be then that would be taken care of. These things didn’t seem to meet a need I had at the time. I think that there's a lot of good in the books that are out there now about work, and about work and faith, but there's not a lot of human companionship in those books.”

[onwork]

[onwork]

Why We Pretend to Be Workaholics

On the Harvard Business Review podcast, Sarah Green interviews Erin Reid, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, about the image of the “ideal worker” and why it’s different for men than women. In either case, expectations in work cultures such as she describes are too high.

The women were expected to not work all the time, and people were policing their time. And they were offered all these accommodations. And so they took them. And I think it is a terrible way of working, to be expected to work all the time. So when they’re offered the opportunity to stay in a professional job and work less, they take it, which is reasonable.

But these opportunities were not offered to men. And the men who tried to avail themselves of formal accommodations, or the men who told the company they didn’t want to travel that much, these men were really harshly penalized. So they were sort of put in this space where it was really stigmatized to say that they weren’t willing to work all the time.

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript.

Read also Reid’s longer article here, “Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks.”

More importantly, however, passing [pulling back on work hours surreptitiously while still appearing to work up 60 to 80 hours per week] is not a good strategy for the organization as a whole: not only does it involve an element of deception between colleagues, bosses, and subordinates, it also perpetuates the myth that those who are successful are also all wholly devoted to work. Yet, a critical implication of this research is that working long hours is not necessary for high quality work. The experiences of those men who passed show clearly that, even in a client service setting, it is possible to reorganize work such that it is more predictable and consumes fewer hours.