40% of Your Week is Spent Working! How Does Your Work Define You?

A job shouldn’t define you, and yet, so often it does. What’s the deal? You wake up each morning, throw down some coffee and breakfast (hopefully!), and hit the road. You work your 8-9 hours and head home again. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? However, when you break down the numbers, things start to get a bit more irritating. See, we only have 168 hours in our 7-day week. Never more. Never less. Assuming you sleep 7 hours a night, and you’re left with 119 waking hours. Normal routines of eating, showering and preparing for your day is likely to take another 2 hours a day (likely far more). Let’s just say what’s left is 105 hours.

So, getting back to that job of yours. 50 hours a week spent either at, or driving to and from work suddenly doesn’t sound so hot, huh? That’s nearly HALF of your non-committed hours, and this is a huge crux of why we do allow our work to define us. Because it’s hard not to let our lives become our work. We were designed to create things, to be a part of things, and to make a contribution with our time here on earth. Therefore, what we do with this aforementioned limited time each week is crucial.

Our work may be our definition in the following ways (potentially subconsciously):

• We spend nearly 40% of our time each week in our jobs
• What we expound energy on each day, by nature, becomes a part of who we are
• This so-called “work” always supports a bigger initiative, community, organization, etc., thereby assigning us as “supporters” of it as well
• We are dependent on it

Did you catch that last point? We truly are dependent on our work. In most situations, jobs sustain us. They provide us with an income, healthcare, a lifestyle, and much more. Without a job, many of us would be in bad shape. Sure, depending on your field, a “new” job may be easy to come by. But changing jobs isn’t always the answer either.

So the true dilemma becomes: one, do you allow your job to define your life? Or two, do you search for a way to find work that reinforces what your “definition” truly is?

My theory is that the sooner you can answer that question, the better off you’ll be.