How To Fix Work

Something’s about to break, and if we don’t change direction soon it’s going to be us. This is your exclusive first look at the opening chapter from my new book that is published today.

The way we are working is broken, and it’s up to us to fix it.

We are crowded into cubicles, worn out on worksites and exhausted in executive roles as office towers stretch high into the heavens, dominating our horizons and psyches. Over the last few decades, almost every industry has been squeezed by longer hours, higher expectations and increased stress, and the end result is literally killing us.

Too many of us are overworked, disengaged and increasingly apprehensive about the future, and much of this malaise can be traced directly back to the role and importance we’ve placed on our jobs, giving it top priority in our lives – to the detriment of everything around us. We have let work dictate how we should live, and now something is about to break. If we don’t make changes soon, that something will be us.

This was the heavy realisation that hit me as my father lay on his deathbed. In those final, delicate moments where time stands still before it’s up, life’s unimportant trivialities, unfinished jobs and never-ending to-do lists finally melt away, leaving only a wide metallic hospital bed, clammy white hands and an unquenchable thirst. At least, that’s what it felt like during the last few hours of my dad’s life.

I’d driven him to hospital a few weeks earlier, the pain of years of compounding cancers growing inside his body breaking his usually stoic facade. My dad had battled through various illnesses over decades, from lung cancer in his forties to bowel cancer in his fifties. But the one that got him in the end was multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that grows inside bone marrow. This incurable disease, sometimes morbidly nicknamed ‘liquid cancer’, can be temporarily dampened by a smorgasbord of drugs, radiation and chemotherapy that zaps any remaining energy, until you’re the patient in Room 628 counting down your hours.

In his final weeks, my father experienced the piercing clarity that comes from knowing your days are numbered. When a visiting priest delivered his final rites, alone in a darkened room, he emerged with tears in his eyes. ‘In all of my years,’ the priest said, ‘I’ve never seen someone so at peace with their life. He told me that he has not one single regret, and is ready to die a contented man.’

Work was an important part of my dad’s life and identity, but never his primary personality. He started a business with a friend, then spent four decades building a successful company with his name on the front door. Outwardly, it was his biggest achievement, but on his deathbed, almost none of that mattered. In the remaining few days, as his breathing slowed and became guttural, all that dominated his thoughts were the people who’d been part of his life: my mum, me and my siblings, his family and friends. As we flitted around his bedside like moths, taking turns to stroke the back of his hand or moisten the inside of his mouth with a tiny wet sponge, he revisited stories of adventures on holidays, family birthdays around the dining table, personal and sporting achievements and time spent on the ride-on lawnmower at his beloved farm. Work hardly rated a mention. All those promotions, late-night emails, corner offices and pay rises won’t mean a damn thing when you’re on your deathbed, holding the hands of your loved ones as you wheeze your final breath.

The loss of a parent feels like being violently knocked off a bike that you’ve spent your whole life learning to ride. When you finally pick yourself back up, you realise one of the handlebars, something you assumed would always be there, is missing. It takes some practice, and many more falls, to learn how to ride properly again, but eventually you get back up and balance, moving forward on a bike that will never be the same.

The years leading up to my dad’s inevitable death ignited something deep inside me as I sorted through fresh memories, earmarking those to keep. He lived an extremely full life, balancing work while fostering deep relationships, pushing his own body and mental capacity right up until the end. Any death is a sobering moment for those lucky enough to still live; a time to stop and reassess, spending quiet moments in reflection to confirm that your values and priorities are aligned with the direction you want to go in.

For years I’d had a gnawing sensation that something wasn’t quite right with the way we are living and working. Inspired by the sense we were in the middle of a momentous shift in the way we work, supercharged by the global pandemic, I began experimenting with different ways of living and working. First, I experimented with location, spending six months working out of a motorhome as my husband and I drove to the sunburnt edges of Australia. We mixed up the usual Monday to Friday schedule, packing as much work as we could into the first few days of each week, leaving the rest of the time free to do what gave us joy, like travelling, exploring, hiking, cooking, reading and snorkelling.

Luckily, my husband’s job, like mine, could be done from anywhere with a power point and an internet connection, and we soon swapped our campervan for six months living in Australia’s Top End, basing ourselves in Darwin. Each working day, we’d dial into video calls from our sun-soaked apartment, then close our computers and spend the afternoon in the pool or at the local swimming hole to cool down.

But the biggest experiment of all came in 2021, when we moved to Europe to combine travelling and working into one occasionally messy but always glorious journey. It took me a long time, and many different experiments, to learn my ideal way of living and working, and that discovery has redefined the role work plays in my life.

The happier I felt experimenting, the more obsessed I became with understanding why it took over two decades to find a way through the noise and make work finally work. I started seeking out others who were also experimenting with different ways of working and living, emboldened by an unprecedented opportunity to bend the rules to achieve the lives they wanted. Many were motivated by the depressing reality of the path they saw laid out ahead of them, a conveyor belt that they didn’t want to blindly travel on.

I read and spoke about the future of work with dozens of the world’s leading experts to try to understand where we are heading. In doing so, I became dismayed. I discovered that hundreds of independent research studies are all flashing amber, their combined alarms warning us that our current approach is broken, making us overworked, disengaged and apprehensive about our trajectory.

(To be continued…)

So there you go.

What you have just read is the first 1,100 words of my new book, Work Backwards, that is officially published today! Following this introduction are another 70,000 more where I go deep down into why work is broken, and how we can fix it. It’s been a wild ride over the past few years to get to today, and I can’t tell you how much I’m going to enjoy speaking with you about some of the ideas inside the book.

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One Useful Thing for April 2024 is being among the first people in the world to read the opening chapter of Work Backwards. You also know that I love being as useful as possible, so alongside the book there is an accompanying IRL Workbook to help you bring to life 10 of the exercises inside the book to life.

Work Backwards is officially out today, and you can get it from any bookstore you want, with a bunch of links to Booktopia, Amazon and Audible here at my new book website. I can’t tell you how pumped I am for us to have a big conversation about how we are working, and living, and how to make it better.

I’m back in Australia for the next few weeks, and it’s glorious here this time of year and will see many of you on my tour. Thank you for the wonderful response to the announcement of Boardroom Lunches over the coming weeks. Due to the demand we’ve upped the size of the room in Sydney, and there are just 4 spots remaining here. In Melbourne we’re down to the final 3 seats, and then it’s sold out.

That’s it from me, have a great month.

Tim