🧶 How to craft more meaning into your work

Studies have found that crafting more meaning and purpose into tasks enables and encourages you to bring your diverse, whole and best selves to tasks each day. This boosts engagement, satisfaction, resilience, and thriving. All critical components for managing stress and preventing burnout.

Crafting is a research-informed and evidence-based approach to personalising tasks. The research into this practice is compelling—it boosts innovation, nurtures health and wellbeing, and amplifies meaning, purpose, and productivity (Baker, 2019). 

Crafting comes in different types, shapes, and sizes., but there are five core factors:

• What (Task Crafting) – What are the different tasks and activities you prioritize? How are you aligning these tasks to your strengths—your neurological superpowers—to make these tasks more engaging?

• Who (Relational Crafting) – Who do you interact and connect with during the course of a task?  How do these people energize you, support you and teach you new ways of tackling the task?

• Why (Purpose Crafting) – Why does the task make a positive difference for others?  Who does this task help?  Why does it matter to them?  

• Where (Location Crafting) – Where is the most effective location to do this task?  What might make where you do this task more joyful for you?

• When (Temporal Crafting) – When might doing this task maximise your energy? What time of day might suit you and the task best?

How do I make crafting work for me?

Whilst most of us often quickly grasp the idea of crafting, we frequently become unstuck when it comes to making it a reality. How do you find the opportunity to craft more meaning into tasks when there are so many other competing demands, deadlines, and priorities?

Fortunately, crafting does not involve adding more hours to your day.

In fact, effective meaning-crafting strategies might actually be the key to finding and unlocking both your time and energy.

The secret to, and science of, making crafting a sustainable habit and routine way of tackling tasks is to pause when you plan—particularly for the tasks you are dreading—to ask yourself: what, who, why, where, and when might this task be more meaningful?   

As with any behavior change, the key is to:

• Start tiny. Create a tiny meaning-crafting habit and choose one task each day to make more meaningful.

• Experiment.  Be willing to play with the different forms of crafting.  You don’t need to tick every factor.  Try aligning your strengths one day, then change locations another day.

• Learn and adjust. As you continue crafting, run a learning loop to discover what’s working well, where you’re struggling, what you’re learning and how you want to adjust your crafting approach.

This is the same approach Indie takes to help you reduce stress, prevent burnout and be awesome everyday.

Indie sends you tips to help you “craft” meaning into your work and tasks, so you love your job and your team is their most productive and effective.