I realized over the last few days that work is taking up more and more of my life. But it’s diminishing marginal utility: as it eats up more of my life, it’s not giving me extra utility, and taking away time from other things.
What’s the motivation for working hard? Well, many people would say that working hard is good to advance in the corporate ladder and make more money etc. However, looking at my personal mission statement, which I wrote a few months ago, I can’t find status or money as being particularly important.
I think that’s accurate. Money and status pretty much only bring me happiness to the extent that they aid in the other missions I’ve written down: namely to be an explorer and seek out new experiences. And it has helped. I bought a one-on-one lesson last Saturday on how to surf – and it worked – now I know. That was very rewarding.
So what does this mean? I’ll keep in mind that doing things at work isn’t really an end to itself – and to place some boundaries so that my life doesn’t get out of balance. Hitting personal objectives will come before hitting corporate ones. Selfish? Sure.
So one concrete action item: acquire and maintain a paper schedule book that’s independent of the Outlook one provided by work. The work one only covers work – I’ll flow only the important things down to my real schedule book.