“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.”
— Steve Jobs, founder of Apple
About this Activity
You’ll develop a job crafting plan to take more proactive control over your work, work environment, work relationships, and how you think meaningfully about your work. You will then commit to enacting that plan over the next six weeks. Each week, you’ll check back in to reflect on how you have enacted your plan, what went well and what hasn’t, and to think about how you’ll enact your plan better, if needed, over the next week.
Work and the decision to work, to join others in contributing to meeting the needs and desires of humanity, has been shown to, positively affect numerous health and well-being outcomes. Work is often today viewed simply as paid employment, but work, conceived of as the sustained effort and contribution to meet the needs and desires of humanity, can also be constituted by care for children or more substantial and sustained volunteering to accomplish some good. In this activity, you will rethink your own work.
The Practice
Getting Started
The first thing that we recommend is to select the day (or days) of the week on which you want to do this activity. It's best to write down the days or add them to your calendar. A core aspect of these activities is writting down your thoughts. If you are doing the activity in the app, we provide forms to write and save your thoughts. If you are doing the exercise on your own, it is best to have a notebook or word document dedicated to this activity.
Instructions
Job crafting is a behavior that we all already do to some degree. This activity is meant to help you become more conscious of this behavior. You'll commit to a six-week plan to improve your job crafting. The first step, which you will complete below, is to develop a job crafting plan. This is a basic outline of how you will go about increasing your job crafting. After completing this first exercise, you can then complete an (optional) reflection entry.
First Entry
Job crafting involves reflecting upon one’s work environment and taking actions at work to try (i) to structure one’s tasks so that they can be done more effectively, or so that tedious tasks are no longer necessary, or so that more challenging tasks are available; (ii) to have better, more meaningful, or more effective social interactions at work; and (iii) to find meaning and purpose in the work being done. Take a few minutes to think about each.
Weekly Practice
You've committed to implementing a job crafting plan over the course of this activity that you set for yourself. As part of your commitment, you opted to return to this app and write about how your job crafting is going. If you don't recall your job crafting plan, please go back to the previous screen, click on 'Baseline Entry,' and re-read what you wrote before returning here. Then take a few moments to clear your mind. When you are ready, please think back over the past week.
The Science
This exercise is grounded in research on relational well-being. Regular practice has been shown to increase positive emotion, enhance resilience, and deepen your sense of connection.
Key References
- McKee-Ryan, F.,Song, Z., Wanberg, C. R., & Kinicki, A. J. (2005) Psychological and physical well-being during unemployment: A meta-analytic study. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90,53–76.
- Frederick, D. E., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2020). Longitudinal meta-analysis of job crafting shows positive association with work engagement. Cogent Psychology, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311908.2020.1746733