What if...we stopped focusing on getting it done and started focusing on doing it well?

The shift towards an outputs-based work culture - where the focus of management is no longer on where people are and for how long, but on what they do - has been an important one. It finally pulls us clear of the post-industrial mindset that has dominated for so long, and, perhaps even more than the technology that facilitates it, lays the foundations for the step-change in the evolution of corporate culture that we're all engaged in right now.

But this shift has had an unintended consequence, which is that, as it floods into the parts of our life it couldn't reach before and time fills up, work has become an increasingly quantitative exercise. It's all about getting stuff done. Ticking stuff off. Even if we love what we do, most of our energy is actually directed towards having it done. Towards it no longer being there. It's arguably the same with our entire careers: Much of our working lives are spent in service of their own non-existence. It's life in negative.

The result is that we've robbed ourselves of the pleasure of doing things, and particularly of the joy that comes from doing things well; and in the process we've robbed ourselves of the joy of work itself. That's not to say that all work is inherently joyful and just waiting for us to change our approach to it; in fact a life spent trying (and usually failing) to get to the end of a to-do list full of things that we couldn't really enjoy under any circumstances is the precise version of hell from which many of those joining the Great Resignation are desperately trying to escape.

But joy can, and does, come from work. It really can come from creating a spreadsheet or writing a report, just as it can come from reviewing a contract or conducting an appraisal. Often, all it needs to be joyful is enough time to be done well. Because it's in having enough time to do something well - to really commit our time, attention, energy, skill and love to something - that we reconnect with the pleasure of the process, the pleasure of the doing. And given how much more time we spend doing things than we spend ticking them off, that seems worthy of some attention, doesn't it?

So, what's the solution? Sadly, there's no magic time tree from which we can pick a few extra hours, though many people seem to be trying to hack that problem by sleeping less. Which means that something else needs to give. And however much it troubles our output-addled and growth-addicted minds to think of it, I think the answer might be to deprioritise how much we get done. I think it might be for managers to ask employees "how much time do you need to do a job that you're really proud of with this task?"

Clearly some kind of boundaries would need to be set, not least because many people to confess to working well under a certain amount of time pressure, but the key would be to invite people to put quality above all else. It would, of course, put short term growth potential at risk by limiting output (in practice if not in theory), but there's every chance that output is going to become increasingly limited by burnout and retention issues anyway, and every reason to believe that the current rate of growth being pursued by many companies simply isn't sustainable. What's more, in place of quantity the door might be opened to a transformation in employee engagement and happiness, to unleashing constrained potential from a quality perspective, and to happier customers. And if you've got those things in place, what more do you need?