Life-maintaining Work vs Life-enhancing Work
December 14, 2008
My fiance and I were discussing ways to allocate our personal (non-professional) work time. We were referring to household work – taking out garbage, doing dishes, cleaning, etc. She believes that doing household work or “something you don’t want to do” is essential for developing character.
My approach was a bit different. I have no opinion on whether work is important for developing character, but I am willing to assume that this is true. On the other hand, because we have a limited number of hours per day, we should focus our energy and time on doing things that are improving ourselves as opposed to maintaining the status quo.
With both of these ideas in mind, we created the following two categories: maintaining work and life-enhancing work.
Maintaining work is defined as something that we must do to function in normal society.
Life enhancing work is defined as something we ought to do to improve our current state and surroundings.
Here are a few examples of activities we placed under maintaining work.
- Dishes
- Trash
- Laundry
- Grocery shopping
- Cooking
- Paying bills
- Shopping for cards, presents, and clothes
- Dropping off dry cleaning
- Packing lunches
We put the following activities under life enhancing work.
- Cleaning old files and cabinets
- Organizing DVDs and Books
- Decorating walls
- Creating a strategic philanthropy strategy
- Working out
- Creating a “disaster recovery” plan for losing wallet
- Reading blogs
We agreed that we should try automating or outsourcing as much maintaining work as possible and maximize the amount of time that we perform life enhancing work.
We will be experimenting with this concept over the next several months and see if this helps drive change in our personal (non-professional) work time allocation.
Do you have a paradigm that you use to organize your personal work life?
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It’s amazing how enjoyable life becomes and how you put so much more effort into life -enhancing when the things (even just a couple of them) that require maintaining are taken care of by someone else.
One of the things we did was to hire a cleaner. Best decision ever. It takes that task completely out of my thought process. It gets done and I get to shift my focus elsewhere, especially on the weekend.