Creating the work you want

What is your ideal day at work?

When people think about their career, they think about the title or position they want, or the company they want to work for. Sometimes they think about the problems they want to be solving, or the people they want to work with. But they rarely think about what one great day at work would be like.

Some questions you might ask to help figure out what that would be for you:

• What helps you be your best self at work?
• How do you spend your time on your best days at work? What energizes you about those days? What would enable you to do more of that?
• What drains you about your worst work days? How could you do less of that?
• What led to your proudest moments at work? How can you do more of the activities that contributed to those moments?
• What impact do you want to have? How would you measure progress on that impact each day?

I've led a few clients through these questions recently, and it's fascinating what comes up. They can quickly start to visualize what a really great work day would be like, what they want more of each day, and what they want less of.

Then I ask them what their current work day looks like. And they see the gaps between that and their visualized work day.

And now they have a plan to improve how they feel at work: close the gaps between what they currently do and their ideal day. That might include:

• Doing more of the things that energize them, and less of the things that drain them .
• Spending less time on low-impact work so they can focus on the most important thing .
• Valuing their own time more .

One of my clients was confused when I asked him these questions because he expected the more standard approach to develop a five year roadmap with goals and outcomes for him to accomplish, with clear answers on what title he should want and what company he should work for. He wanted to know what the plan was because he was used to being given expectations so he could exceed them.

What I like about this approach instead is that it focuses you on what you can change right now, and it doesn't assume that you know what makes you happy (people are terrible at predicting their future happiness ). By using your own experience each day as a metric, you can run constant experiments to see what improves your life . Keep what works, discard what doesn't. And if you do that over years, you will improve how you feel at work.

If you want to learn more about this approach, check out my book You Have A Choice: Beyond Hard Work to Meaningful Impact .