Finding Doses of Meaning in Your Work
The Daily Highlight is about more than productivity, it's a meaning habit.
👋 Hey friends,
In last week's article we explored how using the term "productivity", to include things like exercise, social-time, and hobbies is a slippery slope that makes us think of our wellbeing as a tool and something we maintain, so that we can be more productive. It may feel like a subtle shift, but I think it's important to value our wellbeing for its own sake, and to reevaluate productivity by asking how what we're producing and how productive we are is serving our wellbeing.
With that in mind, I'll be sharing more of these personal and casual articles about specific habits I use to foster meaning, and, when it's useful for my wellbeing, be more productive. Today's habit is a simple one I picked up from Jake Knapp's book "Make Time", called the daily highlight.
Meaning Habit: The Daily Highlight
At the beginning of each work day, I pick one task that will help me make the most progress toward my long term goals and give it some protected focused time on my calendar. The idea is, if you can complete this one task, you can say the day was more or less a success regardless of what else happens. So, I prefer to do my highlight work in the morning before I get distracted, and so that I can go into the rest of my day knowing I've already made solid progress toward my bigger goals ... even if everything else goes haywire.
Today, for example, I spent 2 focused hours brainstorming study designs for my upcoming research project on smartphone addiction and overuse. That was it - my highlight for the day. I did that work from about 8:00am to 10:00am, and feel pretty good about my progress.
And that's what interests me most. The highlight doesn't just help me accomplish more work - it actually changes the way I evaluate whether I had a "good day" and my mood throughout. I think there's a more important psychological effect it has which helps me feel more connected to my sense of meaning in my life.
Understanding What Makes Something Meaningful
First off, to understand what makes something meaningful, there are tons of great research we could draw from, but a personal favourite of mine comes from Mekler and Hornbaek's 2019 paper where they outline 5 components of meaning: Connectedness, Purpose, Coherence, Significance, and Resonance (personally I like to separate connectedness into continuity and belonging, and add agency to the list but let's stick to this for now). Of these, the highlight acts as a daily reflection on purpose and connectedness, and gives my day a source of significance and resonance. Let me explain.
Purpose, as you've probably guessed, is our sense of core goals and directions. It's our sense that we know what we should be doing in the long term. Connectedness encompasses a few things, but one of its main factors is a sense that we're connected to our past self and our future self - to see clearly how our actions last week connect to this week's and how we hope they'll connect to next week's. Significance is a sense that what we're doing matters, that our actions have positive impact on ourselves, our loved ones, and the world around us. Lastly, resonance is an intuition and feeling, that, in this moment, we're doing the right thing.
How the Daily Habit Connects us to Meaning
I like to think of the highlight as a short daily meditation on how what I'll do today, connects me to my longer term goals - my purpose. By boiling down the ocean of tasks I could be doing to one that moves me toward my purpose - doing research and sharing knowledge that will help people live less distracted and more meaningfully - I reaffirm my purpose and build confidence that what I'm doing matters - that my work today is significant. Not only that, usually I look back at what I did the days before to figure out what would be best today which connects me to my past self, building a sense of connectedness and continuity with myself. But, that's just the planning phase.
As I sit down to do my highlight, I get a sense of resonance for those ~2 hours of work. Even if I'm bored, tired, or don't particularly enjoy that work, though often I do, I still know that it's the right thing for me to be doing because - after all I chose that task over everything else I had to do because I thought it was my best chance at making progress toward my purpose that day. Once the work is done, I can look back on my day and know that what I did was significant or at least is most likely to help me do something significant later. All great deeds are just collections of small deeds building on each other over time, right?
So, the daily highlight helps me be more productive, sure, but more importantly it makes that productivity useful to my wellbeing instead of being mindless busyness. On top of that, it acts as a mini-meditation on my purpose and connectedness to myself, while giving me a chance to work on something significant and feel resonance that day. The daily highlight, more than a productivity habit, is a meaning habit - one that's definitely worth adding to your day.
#GuidingQuestions
Do you feel like what you work on each day matters (is significant)?
How can you make sure at least some of what you work tomorrow helps you live in line with your values and purpose?
If you could only finish one task tomorrow, what would it be?
Feel free to share your answers to the #GuidingQuestions below. Thanks for reading! I hope the daily highlight can make your life a little better :D
Cheers,
Nathan Laundry