If you’ve been following MeaningSphere for any length of time, you might have noticed a particular term we use: worklife. Not as in “work-life balance,” a term that suggests a divide between working and living. Just worklife. So what exactly do we mean by that, and why should you care?
Defining ‘worklife’
By worklife, we simply mean your life at work—and how it interconnects with the rest of your life. (Read our statement on worklife here.) At face value, the concept is obvious. We’ve all experienced the spillover effects of work and private life on a day-to-day basis. An argument with a loved one on the way to the office can have us feeling irritable and on-edge the rest of the workday. Conversely, a success at work can have us sailing into the weekend feeling energized, confident, and generous.
This daily push-and-pull is one way we experience the worklife dynamic. Zoom out a bit more, and you’ll notice how the choices you make about work affect your quality of life on a broader scale. Our jobs don’t just take eight hours (give or take) from our day; they draw on our limited physical and emotional resources as well. To lead a balanced life, we need enough of these resources left over for our non-work priorities, too. These may include bonding with our loved ones, experiencing moments of beauty and wonder, taking rest, or engaging in activities simply because they bring us joy.
While your career refers to your identity and achievements within the workplace, the term worklife recognizes the interconnectedness of your work with the whole picture of who you are.
Why this reframe matters
We’ve found that approaching our work and our lives as intertwined parts of a whole is a much more authentic way to move through the world. When we’re building a career, it’s easy to lose this holistic view and start chasing superlatives: a higher salary, a fancier title, or a more exciting opportunity. But when we’re designing our worklife, we’re considering the real impact of our career choices on our life as a whole. It means asking: “Would this choice reflect what’s important to me? Will it allow me to lead the life I want?”
This isn’t to suggest that everyone has the luxury of turning down exciting opportunities to focus on well–being. For plenty of us, work is about making ends meet. If that’s you, the reframe from “career-building” to “worklife-designing” can be just as useful: It can help you envision the kind of worklife you ultimately want to create, beyond your immediate situation.
When money is tight, it’s tempting to believe that a job with a certain income level will solve all our problems (and to be fair, it does solve a lot of them). Having enough money means our basic needs and wants are provided for, giving us a feeling of security and greater freedom in our decision-making. Indeed, recent studies confirm that our well-being increases with income—but there’s a catch! Money itself can’t provide us with a meaningful or fulfilled existence. As a recent piece in Psychology Today argues, money is merely a tool, not a goal. As that article puts it, “Money may open doors, but it’s not the key to happiness. The key is living a life aligned with your values, taking risks, embracing joy, and focusing on what really matters.”
Designing a fulfilled worklife means identifying what you truly care about (for example, quality relationships, commitment to a cause, or adequate rest). From there, you can make career choices that support your personality, needs, and values as a human being—rather than treating financial success as an end in itself.
How to get started: Find out what matters to you
You don’t need to quit your job, sell your home, or otherwise blow up your life to start crafting a worklife that’s uniquely yours. It can start with a simple self-reflection to help you identify the factors that are most important to you. From there, you’ll start to make decisions (big or small) that take into account the bigger picture of who you are, what matters to you, and the sort of life you want to lead both professionally and personally.
To get started, we recommend our free Worklife Fulfillment Indicator. It’s a simple tool we made with exactly this in mind. The Indicator boils down worklife fulfillment into 10 core areas: inspiration, growth, impact, connection, engagement, flexibility, harmony, appreciation, and autonomy. It takes two minutes to complete, and you’ll come away with a snapshot of what’s important to you, and how this measures up against your lived experience. It can help you start to understand and organize your priorities.
You may also find it helpful to speak with a trusted friend or colleague whose worklife design you admire, or to spend some time journaling about your goals and non-negotiables with regard to your worklife. (Okay, last plug: we’ve got a collection of free downloadable activities on our Resources page that can help guide your reflections, if you don’t know where to start!)
Embracing personal meaning over external ‘success’
If taking charge of your worklife sounds like a fabulous idea, but feels difficult in practice, there’s a reason for that (and it’s not just you!).
When you design a worklife around what matters to you, rather than external notions of “success,” you’ll end up rejecting some of our culture’s common-sense ideas about work. That’s because the world of work is focused on economic growth, not on crafting a meaningful existence.
Your choices might mystify a few people whose goals are different than yours, and that’s okay. What’s important is that your work choices bring you closer to a state of harmony with who you are. Everything else is just noise.
