When you have to do something, whether for your job or being asked for something by a friend, how do you perceive it? Is is work? An inconvenience? A favor to be later repayed? Does anyone still give freebies anymore?
In the last decade it seems today’s work ethic has changed so much. Everything ounce of effort has to be justified, scheduled, and ultimately compensated, assuming it was deemed worthy in the first place, and even then it may not come without balking.
I’ve personally witness people ranting for over an hour about work that would have taken under fifteen minutes to get accomplished if they did it without procrastinating. Are we really that shallow now? I have very rarely every gotten satisfaction out of ranting, even when I did not want to do something; I just do not see a benefit from it as it certainly doesn’t help you get the job done quicker.
In giving this some thought, it seems people have grown accustomed to frustration.
I don’t mean people crave frustration, but today’s model almost requires some form of frustration. We, as a people, take on too much, so we get frustrated we can’t do it all. Already being overworked in our mind, being asked to do more can be overwhelming. Some of us do not like the process of delegation or asking for help, so that can cause some frustration, and some of that reluctance can come from knowing how much we don’t like being asked. Getting even a simple thing accomplished can be a vicious circle.
Alot of the issues come from our own greed and selfishness when it comes to our time. To us, our time is valuable. We can easily spend ten minutes of our own time sitting around doing nothing and feel good about it, because it’s what we want to do, however when asked to give five minutes to a cause, well that’s too much, what’s in it for me? Don’t mention the fact I wasn’t doing anything constructive anyway.
How can this mindset be changed?
When we realize just how little we are giving up of ourselves and our time when we’re asked to do something, I think things could start to change.
So how do we do this?
Documenting our wasted time is probably not the best solution. Who wants to know just how much time we sit around being worthless. I suggest documenting the time you are actually being constructive. You would obviously need to include time spent eating, sleeping, driving and whatnot. For most people I think it may just come as a shock as to how many hours short of 24 hours they have when only documenting hours of productivity!
I am going to start doing this myself and will post my findings on Twitter. It will definitely be interesting to see what I think I am going to see.
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