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One of the most potent barriers to finding joy in our work is the amount of toil we endure.

What do I mean by toil?  In any work, there are tasks you simply must do because they make everything else possible.  But too often, as senior professionals, you can spend more time on tasks well below your pay grade.  This contradicts the values you aspire to and fails to reflect your hard-won skills, knowledge, and experience.

Detail becomes Toil

Sometimes, it’s a relief to have an easy day doing simple tasks, but often, it becomes a burden.  One of my experiences was when I enjoyed my work as an IT expert witness.  I loved diving into the details, writing reports, and engaging with sharp barristers.  I felt that I was contributing to the fight for justice.  I even enjoyed being cross-examined by QCs and genuinely enjoyed my work.

But sadly, things changed.  I found myself on an assignment that became overwhelming toil.  It involved a dispute involving over one hundred litigation professionals with about a billion pounds at stake.  Costs were mounting at an extraordinary rate.  I realised that I had lost the desire to engage with the details.  Worse still, I didn’t feel this was a matter of justice.  Instead, it seemed both sides had made so many mistakes that it would never be resolved satisfactorily.

Although I initially tried to stay engaged with the case, I eventually recognised that it had become toil.  As a result, my resistance to doing the work grew significantly, and my motivation completely vanished.  I ultimately found a way to remove myself from the assignment and leave it to others.

What’s Toil for You?

What are the things in your working life that you experience as toil?  Is it sitting through interminable meetings that go nowhere?  Is it writing lengthy reports that you know no one will ever read?  Or is it the strain and effort of endless travel to meetings that, although you may enjoy them, leave you exhausted before you even get there?

Is it that you’re constantly micromanaged, with the feeling that nothing you do is ever good enough?  Does it feel like every step forward is met with two steps backwards?

Death March Projects

I ran software development teams for many years and got involved in IT projects.  I saw a recurring issue: projects would often be 90% done 100% of the time.  You were never truly finished.  Failure of senior management meant there was no clear way to draw a line and say, “We are done.”

You’d fix one thing, and then two other problems would arise.  You’d make progress, only for the client to change their mind, sending the project back to several steps.  You’d work all night to meet a deadline, only to find you had to work through the weekend.

Working hard and pushing things forward can give you an addictive buzz.  You can get immense pleasure from being immersed in a task and seeing progress happen.  But when it starts to feel pointless and endless, it becomes toil.  That’s when the joy is lost.

Toil Kills Joy

The key to finding joy is recognising toil and then releasing yourself.  Set yourself the goal of moving away from tasks, activities, or circumstances that overwhelm you with toil.  Once you progress away from toil and believe things can be different, you will find joy in your work.

Charles McLachlan is the founder of FuturePerfect and on a mission to transform the future of work and business. The Portfolio Executive programme is a new initiative to help executives build a sustainable and impactful second-half-career. Creating an alternative future takes imagination, design, organisation and many other thinking skills. Charles is happy to lend them to you.