Your Job: For What It's Worth

Back in 2011 I wrote a piece called "Your Job: For What It's Worth." I told you to sit down and calculate the time you actually give your job. I'm serious. Not the hours on the offer letter. All of it: getting ready, the commute, the day itself, the slog home, the email after dinner, the hour you don't sleep because some work problem is still dancing in your head. Then I wrote the line I still believe:

"In our work, we trade our life for money. That is the essential foundation of a job."

That was the whole point. The rest was me asking you to look at the number and decide if the trade was worth it.

So look again.

The BlackBerry is in a landfill somewhere, and I don't miss the little red light. The habit didn't die with it. It moved into the phone in your pocket, then into Slack and Teams, which do not have a quitting time. I wrote that same year about carrying my four-year-old up to bed, feeling the BlackBerry buzz, and starting a reply before he was even settled. A sleepy voice said, "Daddy, put your phone away. It's night time." He reached for my hand and I pulled it back so he wouldn't hit the keys and wreck a half-finished email. I put the thing away. I still think about how many nights I almost didn't.

I also wrote, back then, that in twenty years the gadgets would look as dated as an ashtray on a restaurant table, and that some new addiction would come along to replace them. Cute guess. The phone didn't get old. It got hungrier. Same pocket. More channels. Same twitch in your thumb when it buzzes at dinner.

Remote work was sold as getting your life back. Sometimes that's true. You killed a brutal commute and actually saw your people at breakfast. For a lot of other folks, the saved drive just got swallowed by another meeting, another "got a sec?" at 9:30 p.m., another day with no edges. And if you're back on the highway because the company wants bodies in chairs, you may now have the commute and the after-hours chat. The drive came back. The pings never left.

AI tools were supposed to give us time. Sometimes they do, and that's real. Sometimes they just raise the pile you're expected to finish before you log off, and the minutes you saved get filled with more work, not more life. A faster shovel is still a shovel.

Layoff seasons make the math worse, because fear does the negotiating for you. I get it. People around you disappear, the work doesn't, and "at least you have a job" starts to sound like the whole deal. In 2011 I sat at a dinner where executives described finishing a work call in the driveway so they wouldn't walk into the house still on the phone. I still see that move. The job follows you home like a bad virus. It did then. It does now.

What didn't change is the brutal part.

You will never get those minutes back. The time is gone. POOF. You are still spending your life. You have to spend it. The question is still what your time is worth, and what is worth your time.

A job where you like the people, where the work itself gives you some pride or a real challenge, can be a good trade even if it doesn't pay the most. I meant that in 2011 and I mean it now. Don't blow up a good thing because a recruiter dangled a fatter number that comes with a fatter leash.

And money alone will not save a hollow job. In the 2011 piece I retold a story I'd been told, about students paid very well to dig a hole and fill it back in, who quit within a week. I have not gone and hunted down that study. The point didn't need a footnote. A paycheck is not a bandage.

You're also still writing your tombstone, whether you mean to or not. If you come home after a twelve-hour day, kiss the kids, crack the laptop, crash, and the first thing you look at in the morning is the work phone (not your kids, not your wife, not even yourself in the mirror), you've already started today's assignment. I wrote that about a BlackBerry. Swap in whatever is on your nightstand. The inscription doesn't care about the brand.

So do the math, and be honest about it.

If you're salaried, the usual story is annual pay divided by 2,080 hours. That's the official fairy tale. Your true rate is your pay divided by every hour the job actually takes. A plain example, not anybody's real paycheck: $120,000 a year looks like about $58 an hour on the 2,080-hour calendar. Give that same job 55 hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year (the commute, the late Slack, the Sunday "quick look"), and the number drops to about $42. Run your own. I'm not doing it for you.

If the trade is worth it, keep it and protect the edges. Put the phone in the other room when it's night time. Your kid already knew that.

If the trade is a lousy one, don't wait for the company to fix your life. They have other problems. Change the job. Change the terms. Redo the math if you have to.

If you lead people, look at the driveway test. If your folks are finishing calls in the car so they can walk inside as if they were done, the culture already followed them home. That bill comes due. You can build work that is worth the hours you never get back. Plenty of companies don't bother.

If you're trying to build one that does, let's talk.