Out with drudgery, in with meaning — my quest to make work not so bad.

Think about this: you sleep for 8 hours (hopefully), so that cuts your day from 24 hours to 16. On average 8 of those hours are spent at work, so time at work translates to half your waking day.

Considering that “time is the stuff life is made of” (Benjamin Franklin), it behooves us to make sure that that portion of our life is more than tedious toil traded for a paycheck.

      A job often means working for 40 years at something you don't like, just to enjoy 20 years of retirement. We can do better. After all, “work,” the act of putting energy into a task to accomplish a goal, is not the inherent problem. Many people when they retire take up a new hobby, or volunteer. This is a form of work, as you’re marshaling your energy toward a task, and people love this and wait their whole life to get there. The type of work we do, and the conditions under which we do it, determines whether it is meaningful and engaging, or whether it degrades into any number of bad alternatives (there are a limited number of ways work can go right, and probably an unlimited number of ways it can go wrong).

I want to help it go right, and I want to use new findings gleaned from science and psychology to right the ship, and make going to work a meaningful, fulfilling enterprise.