What's important... to you?

Bill Jensen forwarded me some extracts from his new book 'What is your life's work?'. You can read them too - they are available here.

The book contains many letters Bill has gathered over the years. The letters are the output of a meme where you write a letter to your loved ones which expresses with 'absolute conviction and clarity' what is important to you - 'your life's work'. But these aren't just letters about finding some ideal job or having a positive attitude at work. It's possible to fake the trappings of the dedicated employee. These letters aren't about being successful at work. These letters are about finding out what is important to you and doing that.

Another important theme that comes up in the extracts is the importance of doing less at work. The obligation to do less at work, in fact. There are two sides to this obligation which are really the same thing. Bill generally appears to come from the position that you should be doing less of what doesn't matter. He also touches on the position which I read into Slacker Manager's philosophy which is that you should be doing less as a mechanism for improving your productivity. This is the position which I tend to take.

Reducing the amount of effort it takes to achieve the same result is the very definition of productivity. Bill appears to have always been an advocate of this type of philosophy and gives compelling advice on how to it create slack (in the sense of free time) in your work day through improved simplicity. In that space between your increased personal responsibility and when take on additional responsibilities what exactly should you be doing? With his new book Bill provides some interesting answers to that question.