How many times have you thought you have finished a major project only to find out later that it is just the beginning of another? This is so especially if you are a creative entrepreneur or if you work for a large organisation and they see that you are simply good at what you do. They pile everything on your desk. The desire to succeed pushes you to complete the next task on time. The end of one task is an opportunity for the beginning of another. A new challenge follows one major success, a new success precedes a new challenge, and the chains go on. It is an endless game of one success giving birth to another. This is great for your personal success. It is great for your wealth creation and accumulation of personal possession. It is great for your personal ago and recognition.
Modern technology has made it easy for you to undertake several projects at the same time and achieve successes. They call it multi-tasking. You can now attend a meeting in London at 2pm and attend another one in Japan at 3pm. You can conclude a multi-million pound sales deal over your mobile telephone handset while driving in your car to a meeting to conclude another deal. This increasingly popular management practice makes business managers think that their employees are invisible beings who are capable of achieving more for less. Workers are now required to do more in fewer hours and earn less for doing more. If they want to earn more, they have to work longer hours. This means less quality time for family and friends leading to work/life imbalance. What are the long-term national health implications of this growing trend?
A recent Relate survey in Britain showed that a fifth of people aged between 35 and 44 years wished they could have a better relationship with their family. Almost a third of people in this age group said their relationship would improve if they could work fewer hours.
The pressure to deliver more for less is everywhere today and is gaining more credence even among management experts and politicians. Doctors are required to give more quality treatments to their patients with lower budgets. We expect teachers to provide better education to our children with reduced spending on basic infrastructural facilities in the classrooms. Social workers must provide better care to vulnerable people in the community with lower budgets.
In response to these apparently conflicting demands, local service managers have devised ingenious ways of delivering services to their clients. Their goal is to balance their books. For example, most public organisations no longer employ staff on permanent basis. This reduces their inherent liability by way of the extra allowances and the fringe benefits that come with permanent employment such as holiday pay, pensions, National Insurance contributions, etc. Instead, they now regularly hire part-time temporary agency staff that they are able to fire at the slightest possible opportunity using their power of carrot and stick.
These are some of the realities of today’s employment market. I belief this is the time for you to begin to ask yourself some challenging questions. What is the most important thing in your life today? What is your purpose in life? What legacy would you like to leave behind when you die? If your doctor tells you today that you have just six months to live, what would your number one priority be? What would be your only regret if you die today? Life is not all about personal enrichment. It is not all about accumulation of perishable possessions. There is much more to your life than just running the endless rat race. Think!
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