There’s a predictable pattern to how most of our lives unfold after we enter the workforce. It’s a well-trodden path that we don’t tend to think much about, and it’s one of the reasons that the way we are working is broken.
The default path is that, after leaving school or college, you begin to look for a job in an area that matches your interest or expertise. After some job hunting, you eventually find a business that will hire you, and you begin in the most junior position in the company. Your employer decides how much salary they’ll pay you for your work, and you slowly start the climb up the corporate ladder. Each week or month, a payment drops directly into your bank account, and you use it to pay for the lifestyle you can afford. This might include your rent, credit cards, bills, car payments, food, and everything else until all the money magically disappears from your account until the next payment comes in.
Then another salary is deposited and the cycle repeats. This continues over and over until work becomes primarily a means of getting enough money to pay for whatever lifestyle you can afford. This goes on and on, and it can be a very hard rip to get out of. I call this the work-money-life cycle, and it’s the primary way that generations have lived and worked. And now, due to a variety of reasons, it’s breaking.
I have spent the last few years going deep into the way we are working as part of research for my new book, Work Backwards. I’ve read hundreds of research papers about meaning at work, happiness, stress, and other topics. I traveled the world spending time with dozens of the leading professors on these topics, and interviewed workers from all industries. In doing so, I realized that we are thinking about work and life the completely wrong way around, and it’s created a workforce that is—on the whole—overworked, disengaged, and apprehensive.
But don’t just take my word for it. Study after study has shown that we are working longer hours than before, even with the rise of things like hybrid working. Microsoft, which collects data every time you interact with one of its products, tracked how long people around the world spend using their Teams software. They found that when many people shifted to logging in from home instead of the office, the length of the average workday increased by 13%, or 46 minutes, in the two years after the pandemic began in March 2020.
And where traditionally most professional workers had two productivity peaks in their day, before and after lunch, the same researchers observed the emergence of an additional peak since the pandemic, with a third bump of work taking place in the late evening. They call this a “triple peak day.”
Gallup data from workers in 155 countries shows that almost two-thirds of us are emotionally detached at work, with only half of U.S. workers saying they were really satisfied with their jobs. And according to a PwC report, around a third of workers in my home country of Australia, say they are already worried that their roles could be replaced by AI technology in the next three years.
None of these trends paint a particularly rosy picture of the future of work, so how can we fix it? That’s a question I’ve been obsessed with solving, and outside of structural changes to how our society operates, there’s one thing we do have control over, and that is our individual response to how we think about work.
To solve it, we need to reverse our thinking. Instead of thinking about work-money-life, we need to flip so it’s life-money-work in that order, and anyone can do that by following three steps.
The first step is to change direction, and of course, you’re going to need a MAP, which stands for the things you should know about yourself: your Meaning, Anchors, and Priorities. Meaning means understanding what meaning you get from work, as well as from outside it. Anchors are the three or four core values that make you, well, you. And Priorities are about consciously deciding how you spend your time on things that are important to you.
Once you have your MAP, you must learn what ‘enough’ is for you. This is a very personal part of the process, as everyone’s version of how much money and success they need is different. However, figuring out how much money you need to live a life you’re happy with, and quantifying an exact annual figure on paper, can be an incredible freeing exercise to do.
The final step is to think about work, which is usually what most of us begin with. Now that we know what meaning we get from work and outside it, what our anchors are, and what we want to prioritize—as well as how much money we need—we can focus on the type of work we should be doing.
We are living through a once-in-a-generation moment to use many different tools to help us work in different ways. Some of these include things like hybrid working and four-day weeks, which are increasing in popularity as more companies adopt them. Others are technological advancements like AI that can augment our jobs by removing some time-intensive tasks.
All of these should be viewed as tools that you can experiment with, and the most important part of this is knowing exactly what you’re trying to solve. After completing the first two steps, you should know what kind of life you want, and how much it costs, to be able to use some of the modern tools to get you there.
This process of figuring it out, in reverse of the traditional order, is called the Work Backwards method and it’s one of the best ways that anyone can take advantage of this unique moment in history to learn how to work smarter and live better.
