Mindfulness of purpose at the office

My team at work is currently shorthanded, and it will be for the rest of the year. We’ve spent the past week looking at our workload, and separating what needs to happen from what has to wait. It’s been a good exercise with a lot of surprising benefits.
If you’ve been doing a job for a while, then you’ve no doubt accumulated a bunch of projects that are less than vital. They’re not a good use of your time and energy, and they don’t contribute to your bottom line. But for whatever reason, you’ve kept on doing them.
We can’t always say no to these jobs, but if we can, then we should. The people we serve, especially in the nonprofit sector, deserve our best work. Not only that, but we deserve to do the best work we can. It’s never fun to have to trim the fat, but if you treat it as a chance to focus on what’s important, the impact can be huge.
In many ways, the best and most unexpected benefit of this process is what happens next. Once you know your most important jobs, and you know why you’re doing them, you have to sit down and do them. And once you do that, your whole job starts to feel more important.
Each job I’m doing at the moment is a job that’s still on my plate because I’ve identified why it matters. When I sit down to do it, I’m acutely aware of why I’m doing it. I know who it benefits, and what kind of impact it makes. When new jobs come along, I’m now obliged to ask these questions and confirm that the job is worth doing.
That might not sound like much, but it goes a long way. There’s a lot to be said for knowing why you’re doing the work you do. You end up doing better, and you feel better doing it.
