(2023-06-26) Lim Responsiveness Defines Meaningful Work

Liminal Warmth: "Responsiveness" Defines Meaningful Work. Two of the questions I return to frequently in search of career and project-oriented self-knowledge are, “What do I really want?” and “What should I be doing next?”

How do you know if the work you’re doing is actually useful for people in order for it to generate that meaning?

Sasha Chapin’s observations on “responsiveness” added another piece of the puzzle for me today by distilling the essence of what I think it looks like when someone “tells you” that your work is meaningful... Impact is the key word in that sentence, and further comments he points to by Emmet Shear reinforce how this specifically applies to responsiveness, burnout, and meaningful work. (2023-06-26) ChapinWhatTheHumansLikeIsResponsiveness

a known lack of impact can be even worse than being a cog in a machine where you can’t see your direct impact: you feel more like what he aptly calls a “banana lying in the dust.”

For knowledge workers, the “dust banana” problem often arises in the form of scrapped projects, unused designs, ignored research, and work-impacting top-down decisions that are made at odds with stated organizational goals, all of which are so common that it hardly bears mentioning. (agency)

The “responsiveness” factors of your manager’s appreciation and recurring paycheck actually conflict harshly with the directly-observed (lack of) impact you’re making on the organization, since you might now feel extractive and deceptive rather than just useless.

it’s evident that the solution for finding meaning-measuring responsiveness to our work is deeper than simply receiving compensation or verbal appreciation. For the responsiveness to genuinely meet our internal standards for generating meaning, we need to directly perceive its utility to someone

Your sense of derived meaning from the work you perform won’t lie to you about what you’re feeling, and if you’re anything like me, it probably won’t shut up about it either. What you do with that feeling, and the likelihood of it changing on its own within a timeframe that you can tolerate, are exactly the factors you need to consider in a personal search for meaningful work.