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Making “work” work better for me

Published 2026-03-02

I have this nagging feeling that in recent years, it’s mainly my time spent on work that feels like it could be further optimized. Everything else in my life outside of work feels mostly optimal — like I don’t need to change a thing. Here’s a deeper reflection into why that might be, and what I can consider tweaking.

Outline.

Activity goodness. What makes an activity “good”?
Work activity goodness. Let’s take a closer look at work specifically. Which sub-activities of work make it good vs bad?
Work attributes that make it not so good. There are attributes of a 9–5 job that I suspect make it at odds with my definition of good.
What I can change. Given the above definitions of good and bad, can I steer myself to making work more “good”?

Activity goodness

What makes an activity “good”? For me, I suspect that I feel good about keeping an activity in my life if it satisfies all of these criteria.

Past. If I look back to memories where I have done the activity, did I feel like it was time well spent? If my life resume is filled with this memory, do I feel good about it?
Present. Do I feel good during the activity? Was I in a flow state? Was I laughing? Was I curious?
Future. Do I look forward to doing this activity again?
Note: experiencing vs remembering self is a very related concept.

Examples of good activities. All these activities satisfy the above definition for me: 1–1’s or small friend gatherings, practicing music and jamming with others, climbing both solo or with friends, read/write/think on topics that are interesting to me — writing this blog post is one example!

Re: work. It comes and goes.

Past. Sometimes I look back at the past and am particularly proud of some achievements, or some status-signalling names attached to my name. Sometimes I wonder if I really needed X years staying in that company doing things that don’t generate new notable memories for me, but maybe these are unavoidable, and a prerequisite to generating those important memories.
Present. Some work activities are fun and put me in a flow state. Some others really drain me. I will dive into this later.
Future. I’m fortunate that throughout most of my work life I don’t actually feel Monday blues, but I would say that the frequency at which I’m excited to work on something work-related is usually lower than my non-work activities. More on this in a later section.

Work activity goodness

Okay, an activity is worth keeping if it feels good in all the 3 grammatical tenses. Now, “work” is composed of varying sub-activities. Which ones are “good” to me?

Good: Flow / energizing. These activities either put me in a flow state, or leave me energized afterwards and make me go “wow today was a good day”.

Investigating / debugging / experimenting. Recently I had to debug why our LLM API calls kept bumping into 429 resource_exhausted errors. This entire process of writing things to try, being curious about if the new ideas will work, designing and running experiments to show what works vs doesn’t, then presenting to the team a solid case — all these were highly energizing to me.
Designing / thinking carefully. For LLM pipelines I had to reason logically about the important intermediate steps that must exist vs. are follow-ups. I also find it fun to clarify vague problems by figuring out the basis vectors in the decision space. This kind of thinking is fun — it has a puzzle-like element to it, and I would still do it even if AI someday gets better than me at it.
Momentum-building / learning-focused meetings. On reflection, I actually have loads of fun driving some meetings. These are some of them: (1) driving clarity on status updates — what’s been done? what’s not? who’s going to do what next? (2) educational talk — I thought hard about this cool concept, I’m going to explain to you how it works.

Not so good / draining. It’s after these activities that I feel more exhausted.

High-disagreement communication. Resolving disagreements is just more mentally taxing than types of communication where you agree and augment points. I think this is true for most people. These are unavoidable whenever you want to align on a solution that works for multiple humans, to be sure, but it’s worth being honest to myself that my current psyche is more drained by these discussions than energized.
Low-clarity meetings. I realize I get easily drained when a discussion loops without a clear decision-making framework. I think this stems from a basal frustration of mismatched expectations regarding meeting outcomes.

Work attributes that make it not so good

We talked about activities, but now let’s investigate attributes of a 9–5 job that might make it “less good” as an activity.

Package deal. It’s an all-or-nothing deal. You must do all of the activities above, both the energizing and draining activities. I can’t just write a design doc, then not hold a design review and open myself to a possibility where I will have to resolve disagreements.

Can’t pause / resume. You have to show up every weekday, at about the same time. You can’t just take a day / week off just because you don’t feel like it. OTOH, for my hobbies, if I’m feeling less stoked about, say, badminton, I can just pause it and go climbing for a month and only choose to pick badminton up again when I regain my stoke.

Justification through impact or money. The activity of receiving money is very nice :) but the activities being paid for can degrade in enjoyment (Related: overjustification effect). Another way I justify my choice in work is also through lines similar to “this is impactful”. I wonder if over-indexing on impact alone doesn’t work for my psyche. I reflected on that here.

Memory ownership. Some things I did throughout my work life feel like memories that I created for myself, but then no longer belong to me after I switch companies. All that time spent building X at company Y — they feel like company Y owns that memory rather than me. Contrast this to 1–1 conversations with friends, or the act of me performing a musical piece, or me finishing an outdoor climb — all these feel like I am an irreplaceable part of the memory — the memory is mine, as opposed to an external entity’s.

Doing better

Here are some guesses on how I can improve the not-so-good part of my work life.

Re: draining activities — reframe. These activities are not avoidable, so I just have to reframe how I approach them.

Re: Disagreements, reframe as an opportunity to learn — and I love learning. “ooh interesting, we have a value misalignment. It’s an opportunity for me to learn how to expand my thinking / values so they work for multiple people.”
Re: Decisions not made efficiently. Case 1: Do I want to own it? — if so, I will have fun thinking clearly. Case 2: If I don’t want to own it -> Guide the other person, e.g. I think a written doc containing these sections would help, but after that, separate your tasks.

Re: can’t pause / resume. Reframe: This lack of flexibility is a worthwhile tradeoff if I want consistent colleagues who are available to me during the same hours, and are committed to work with me on long-term projects. Explore avenues that naturally offer this pause/resume optionality outside of core hours, like mentoring or tutoring, to scratch that itch.

Re: impact-based. I’ve historically over-indexed on ‘impact’ to justify my energy. I want to experiment with letting joy, play, and curiosity be equal drivers. When I am energized by the work itself, the impact naturally follows.

Re: memory ownership. Write blog posts (like this) to share my learnings. Seek projects that are open-sourceable or are announceable (like this). Collaborate on hobby projects with friends without the pressure of work (in the past, side projects with friends brought me great joy).

Mindset to move forward w/o suffering

A closing thought — something I have to remind myself every time I do these kinds of reflections. Q: “How can I enjoy the present as much as I can even though I know the present isn’t optimal?”

The present is optimal in the sense that I have thought and chosen the best I can. I am also excited about the future — I look forward to going through all kinds of experiences that life has to offer to me as I continue to reflect on the challenges posed by the diverse “present”s and steer my future thoughtfully.

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