Photo by Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash

You Don’t Know When You’re Working

As the workplace evolves — accelerated by COVID home-working — perhaps the ways we are judged to be “working” need re-thinking.

I’ve operated in management driven organisations — endless meetings and a permission culture. Your “work” was effectively measured by what your boss thought of you.

I joined a targets-based company — everything came back to KPIs, tallies, incentives and internal competition. Your “work” was purely judged on your numbers.

The best work I’ve ever done has been working for myself, founding a startup, consulting and freelancing.

It’s been stop-start, scattergun, non-linear.

Where’s the work? No boss to impress, no internal leader board. Perhaps in previous organisations I’d be deemed to be failing. I’m not.

It’s only looking back that I see. Evenings, weekends, multi-tasking, managing, creating, collaborating, strategising.

My “work” is inspired by and judged in terms of one thing:

Progress.