The Future of "How We Work": Why We Should Explore Ways to Work With vs. Against Our Work

I'm Lisa 👋 Welcome to this week's edition of Stream of Consciousness!

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The demand for people who work in decision-making jobs is drastically increasing. Thanks to the rise in automation and machines handling more work, many of the “leftover jobs” for humans involve open-ended decisions and require skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, and adaptability.

The Wold Economic Forum even deemed that this skill - decision-making - is the skill that employers want most.

There's only one catch.

The way we are currently trying to harness this skill within the existing framework of “the way we work” has some conflicts with meeting many of our basic human needs.

I’ve had a few conversations with friends lately that have inspired me to write about this topic as it's a hot one.

Our early ancestors were focused on survival and rather than have separate jobs from “daily living”, work was integrated into their lives. It was structured around survival, community needs, and reciprocity. “Work” consisted of activities like hunting, fishing, farming, craftsmanship, and more. It was communal. It was tied to nature and seasons and the weather. It was tied to movement. There was a connection between what was beneficial for the group as a whole and what was beneficial for the individual.

As we became more industrialized, we could be more productive a whole but with the emergence of factory work and urbanization, our work moved towards working in set shifts, working in hierarchal structures, and focusing on wage output vs. goods output.

Since then, there have been a number of other changes that, IMHO, have changed the way we need to approach taking care of our basic human needs.

These changes in the way we work have meant that our focus has had to shift mostly from present (what can I find to eat right now?) to future (what can I do to help the company in the future?). We are constantly shifting from trying to understand data and trends from the past to help us understand and better predict the future to reduce the degree of uncertainty we will face.

But perhaps the greatest change since the industrial revolution has been that most jobs have gone from time based to decision based. Rather than clocking in and out at set times and having a hard cut off between work and life outside of work, many of the jobs we work today are focused on the quality of our decisions.

If our value is defined by decision quality, it becomes quite a challenge to have an “on” and “off” switch to tell ourselves when we can start and stop collecting information, connecting dots, framing and filtering data and context to feed into those decisions. The lines between work and life become blurred.

There's a lot of research around when sparks of creativity and ideas happen and they commonly occur during blank space time when the mind can wander, like when you're having a shower, when the subconscious is at work in the background and has space to flow.

I would argue that now, at least in North American society, we have become so productivity focused that we have optimized the crap out of ourselves out of ourselves and engineered away most of our “blank space time”. We are always connected, always scheduled, and always feeling behind in some area of life. So, not only can our brains not turn off because we are predominantly working decision-based jobs, but we also are overworking ourselves without giving our subconscious mind time to roam freely and support us.

Some contextual “knowns”:

• There are 24 hours in a day

• There are things we need to do in a day to take care of our basic human needs in order to function (sleep, eat, hygiene, move, and more) (survival)

• Most of us need to do some form of work that creates some form of value in order to obtain resources to fund our existence (survival)

• Some of us need to care for others in addition to ourselves - family members, children, etc. (survival)

• Many partnered households require 2 full-time incomes to survive (survival)

• There’s a growing trend in North America around adults remaining single and unpartnered (according to 2021 Pew research study, 31% of US adults say they are unpartnered and a 2023 study done by the U.S. Census Bureau found that 46.4% of US adults are single) - (read: more people in North America are leaning on themselves only to survive…or leaning on parents and other family members more)

If you take a given 24-hour period, for example:

• Say 8 hours are allocated to sleeping (ideally) plus 1 hour as a buffer to wind down before bed (24-9=15 remaining hours)

• Say 8 hours go to scheduled work (15-8=7 remaining hours)

• Say 1 hour is needed to get ready for work in the morning (waking up, hygiene, getting dressed, makeup, hair) (7-1= 6 remaining hours)

• Say 3 hours are needed for making and eating 3 meals (6-3=3 remaining hours)

This is not taking into account any commuting for work, overtime hours for meetings before or after regularly scheduled meetings or responding to Slack messages and emails or business trips and leaves only 3 hours to take care of the rest of our basic human needs like exercising, banking/finances, cleaning, laundry, taking care of kids, socializing, investing quality time with a significant other and family members, doctor's appointments, car maintenance, meditation, and anything else we need to do to take care of ourselves. It also doesn’t take into account travel time for anything outside of work (i.e. picking up kids from school, getting to and from doctor appointments, etc.).

Breaking it down and looking at the numbers is something I find quite shocking.

I'm reading the book “Civilized to Death” right now and it quotes a 1928 essay written by economist John Maynard Keynes called, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” where he imagines what the world will be like a century in the future (now):

“For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem. How to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest have won.”

Now, the average North American is not twiddling their thumbs trying to figure out what to do with our time. Instead, we are playing a dangerous game of tradeoffs with our basic human needs, while at the same time, also aren't giving ourselves the blank space time to feed into better decisions (both at work and in our lives). We are on a treadmill that keeps speeding up while we keep breaking down. And I think the rise of AI is going to ramp up the speed and incline exponentially.

When Henry Ford instilled the “OG” 9-5 in 1926 at the Ford Motor Company, it was designed to create more stability and certainty for workers during an uncertain time while carving out set hours for more rest and free time during which employees would be encouraged to buy more consumer goods. It didn't take off immediately. The Fair Labour Standards Act was passed in 1938 in the US and 9-5 working hours became more mainstream outside of industrialist fields by the 1950s and 1960s with the rise of white collar office jobs. Now, we don't have the same physical boundaries around the time that we work and I believe we are at another critical inflection point.

We have the rise of decision-based jobs coming amidst another period of global uncertainty and instability. Pair this with the current technology landscape (AI, automation, ecosystems for connected remote work) and we are at a point where the old systems don't necessarily fit 1:1 with the current circumstances. I would also argue this is all factoring into both Canada and the US experiencing their lowest ever happiness ranking scores.

While more and more of us who come from younger generations are looking at the way things work and going, NOPE, turning 180 degrees and becoming self-employed influencers, content creators, affiliate marketers, and more, I think there's a bigger question to ask:

What can we do about the current way we work as a whole so that our systems work with us vs. against us?

I believe the future of work involves structuring our lives around practices that support improved health and improved decision quality. This involves better connection with our own internal world and more awareness about how our bodies and minds are feeling and what they need to feel good over the long-term.

One that involves prioritizing sleep quality, natural foods, frequent movement, time spent outdoors in the sun, building connected, genuine and nurturing relationships, and longer periods of nervous system regulation. One that involves de-coupling decision quality from time. One that involves being clear on our values and structuring our lives around those values in a flexible and adaptable way. One that involves better boundaries between work and life and blank space time.

By identifying what matters most to us and defining what boxes we want to tick, it gives us a better chance to tick more of them.

By doing regular life check-ins with ourselves and keeping it fucking real (with compassion). Identifying the specific areas where we are feeling misaligned that are taking our energy vs. nurturing us and giving us energy. Identifying the things that are making our bodies scream at us while we subconsciously say, “Just hold on a little longer - I'll take care of you later.” vs. the things that are giving us green lights and making us feel good.

By starting with the basics like sleep, we can start to build better habits that we can stack and that amplify our capacity as individuals and as a collective group.

If you're in a leadership and/or HR position and are reading this and it resonates, I would urge you to think about any changes you can tangibly make to help support some of these things IRL.

IMHO they could include options like 4-day work weeks to allow for more continuous unblocked time in a given 7-day period, flexible hours, output value and productivity measurement that is decoupled from time input (i.e. similar to how consultants sometimes offer value-based vs. time-based pricing), flexible working locations and options (i.e. the ability for employees to choose between remote, co-working spaces, in-office in a flexible way based on what works best for them to operate most effectively in their role), and crystal clear and upfront expectations around communication (specifically outside of regular working hours).

Additionally, we can take a closer look at ways of working that help balance the need to coordinate and produce things as a company with supporting individual employee needs, the feeling of employee ownership, and the feeling of employee empowerment.

Perhaps part of the resistance to changing things is our inherent biologically ingrained aversion to uncertainty. But we are already living in very uncertain times…so maybe it’s the best time to try something new.

I certainly do not have all of the answers. But I do know what it feels like to hit the wall and have no other options but to change my priorities. And I absolutely think this is a topic worth exploring further.

It’s also important to call out that many people have found jobs and lifestyles they love that are working with them - they may be decision based or may not be. I think that's awesome and if that's you, keep on going! If it is, perhaps you can respond to this with what you have found has worked for you as well. I'd love to hear your PoV.

What are your thoughts about the shifts in how we work? How have these shifts impacted you? What changes would you like to see?

Soulwork 💜

• ✨ Shoutout to my Aunt Lucy for forwarding this great Mel Robbins podcast episode to me: How to Control Your Mind and Redirect Your Energy to Self-Transformation

Thanks for Reading!

Thank you for supporting me, for following along, for emailing me, and sharing your thoughts and ideas 🙏

If this edition resonates, please drop me a note and let me know. I love hearing from you and it makes me feel less like a robot typing away behind a glass wall. If you know a friend who might enjoy reading this, forward it to them.

Sending good vibes and intentions your way. You got this. ✨

-Lisa ✌️