How to Cheat on Your Job Description

Last week, I wrote about the benefits of working on one’s vocation. But if you don’t have a sense of vocation in your current job, the shift may not be an overnight, or easy, move. 

Fortunately, there’s another route that we can all access today—cheating on our job descriptions. 

Essentially, our job descriptions define what the company wants us to do, and our annual goals prescribe the outcomes. And while we can attend to all of the things the company wants, cheating on our job descriptions is about finding ways to do what we actually enjoy doing at work. 

I’ve witnessed several leaders take on this strategy. For a C-suite leader of a network of schools, cheating on her job description meant going into classrooms to interact with kids—the reason she got into education in the first place. 

For the executive director of a nonprofit that serves those experiencing homelessness, cheating on his job description meant carving out time to converse with community members, even though there was always plenty of “executive work” to do. 

For you, it might mean building a killer spreadsheet to prove to the analyst on your team how good you were at Excel 20 years ago. Whatever it is that got you excited at the start of your career. 

If done right, other people seeing you take on these activities should say, Can’t you delegate that? or Is that really the best use of your time?

And the answer is yes! It’s a fantastic use of my time because it gives me the emotional energy to get the rest of this mess done. 

The indulgence we allow ourselves is actually an investment. 

…If only we gave ourselves permission to be at less than our “highest” productivity at all times. 

Luckily, a small amount of indulgent activity may be all we need to secure the energy boost. In Love + Work, Marcus Buckingham writes: “Recent research by the Mayo Clinic into the well-being of doctors and nurses reveals that 20 percent is the threshold level: spend at least 20 percent of your time at work doing specific activities you love and you are far less likely to experience burnout.”

The benefits of this strategy come from the fact that, while we may take a job for high-minded reasons, our day-to-day satisfaction is mostly affected by the concrete tasks we take on. Buckingham writes that between purpose (the “why”), the people we work with (the “who”), and the literal activities (the “what”), the latter is most important: “In study after study, those people who reported that they had a chance to do something they loved each and every day were far more likely to be high performers and to stay in the role than those who reported that they believed in the mission of the company or liked their teammates.” 

Michelle Obama makes a similar point in her new book, The Light We Carry, when describing why the “small” act of knitting is so important for her larger work. She writes, “[w]e need to remember to keep laying the small alongside the big. One is a good companion for the other. Small endeavors help to guard our happiness, to keep it from getting consumed by all that’s big.”

If it’s good enough for Michelle, it’s good enough for me!