When Work Becomes Play

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Thursday, 14 April 2011 20:16

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I hate preachy posts and I go out of my way not to fall into that trap. As it happens I received an email a little after midnight from a reader who had a question regarding the timing of Facebook marketing messages and, since I was still up and writing I replied within ten minutes of it.

He sent me a surprised message back thanking me for the quick response and marvelling how I was still up working so late. I suppose you don’t really expect someone to reply to you within minutes to a business message you send at midnight the fact is that though I was up I did.

After I had sent it I thought a little about whether it was unusual to put in such a long day. Considering that I had started the day just before 7.00am I had clocked up (by normal standards) just over seventeen hours. The kind of thing I advise against when I advocate achieving a work/life balance and getting away from the self-destructive, always plugged-in feeling we sometimes get when we can never escape from our work no matter where we are.

The message made me take a breather and think exactly where the time had gone on that day and whether my working habits were beginning to get out of control. The thing is that while the day had started amidst a relative frenzy of emails to be attended to, articles to be written and a book which needed to go through one final editing stage, by midnight I had settled to check out online trends, carry out some research and test a couple of theories I was developing on how social marketing impacts on SEO when there is also a robust content creation strategy in place on a website.

Maybe the first part of the day was ‘work’ but by the time I hit midday I was doing things I loved and certainly twelve hours later I was deeply absorbed in research and the writing up of notes and I had hardly noticed the time.

Although still classified as ‘work’ what I was doing felt more like playing and I had lost myself going from site to site, testing out what I had thought up and checking out what’s new on the web. It all sounds suitably geeky but when I leave my desk I make a point of unplugging.  Around midday I hit the gym and the only thing that travels with me then is my gym bag and water bottle.

Again if I am driving or are with a friend I make sure my Blackberry is switched off. Beyond the conscious decision to give my brain a break from the online work there are two other factors here at work which I only really understood when my reader’s email forced me to analyze my own day. First, I value the time I have. Every second which passes is forever lost, there is no getting it back. This simple realization has made me pack each day and each moment with things which really matter.

If I do something for a friend, I have chosen to do it of my own free will. I put in all the time and effort required to do it as well as it can possibly be done. Similarly when I am at the gym, or driving, or enjoying a chat I make a conscious effort to be aware of the moment, to enjoy it, to make it feel as real as possible rather than some transient instance I just need to get through.

I apply the same principle to my work.

I allow it to absorb me not because it is the only thing I have but because when I do it I really, really want to push the envelope and deliver to the highest possible degree. Otherwise, what is the point?

I guess what I am trying to say is that unless we infuse what we do with excitement and a sense of wonder there is no real point in bothering to do it at all. The web these days is full of millions doing something similar. You want to start a website on fashion? There are millions of them out there. You want to talk about  SEO? Last time I checked the search term on Google produced over half a billion pages. You want to sell wishbones? Over a million pages appear on the web. No matter what you do there are so many other people on the planet working online that it is impossible for you to be the only one.

This makes it hard to be ‘average’ to keep your head down and simply bob along. The web has become the greatest equalizer I know. Web technology and digitization have made everything cheaper, faster and (arguably) better. This has also made it difficult to work on autopilot. Unless you are really fired up by what you do, unless you are passionate about what it takes to get there, the chances are that you won’t.

In the case of SEO, for instance, my own passion has come from the fact that I have seen the ‘mystique’ and opaque talk create a cloud around the subject to the detriment of the industry and the spirit of the web. Because I passionately believe that the online world is the one (and possibly last) chance we have to create a fairer, wealthier and more just world I use it to empower webmasters looking to succeed by providing knowledge, expertise and tips (mostly free).

I take the same approach in my books intending each to be a vehicle for success. It works for me. I often lose hours spent in discovering new things online and I also devote a small percentage of my time to simply browsing the web, following the trail of news, links, and linked posts to wherever they may take me.

Often, in this process, I end up learning something entirely new, or finding out something which then leads me to something else which feeds into something I may be doing. The point is that if you really want to succeed you need to get to the stage where you do not count the hours you work or the effort you put in.

You have to really feel fired up or give your current work up and do something which really fires you up. I said as much in a video blog on what is it that makes you leap out of bed each morning. Work is not really life but we spend so much of our life working that unless we learn to enjoy what we do and do what we enjoy, we will only end up living in the digital equivalent of the last century where people waited for retirement to ‘start’ living, where work was a place to pass the time and where excellence was notion to be paid lip service to.

We all know that world was not a great place to be in. What we do in the future and how it pans out really depends upon our own ability to make drastic changes to the present. Starting with work on that account is as good a place to start from as any.

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