Researchers found that those who spent 20 per cent of their time on things that gave them meaning were less at risk of burning out than those who didn’t. They also found a “ceiling effect”, showing that even if the doctors spent more than 20 per cent of their time on meaningful tasks, the effect on their levels of burnout remained the same.
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So you don’t actually need to find all aspects of your job meaningful, as long as some parts of it are. It’s also just as important to know what meaning you get from your life outside work.
The second part of MAP: anchors. These are often referred to as core values, but I prefer “anchors” to differentiate them from corporate values in the workplace.
Anchors are the qualities that make you, well, you, and the most common ones are things like honesty, respect and integrity. Identifying your unique combination of anchors, and how they show up in the real world, is one of the best things you can do for yourself this year.
To give you a quick example, my personal anchors are optimism, fairness and community, and they inherently drive who I am as a person. In my case, they were mostly forged into my personality modelling the behaviour of my wonderful mum and dad, and narrowing them down has helped me know myself infinitely better.
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The last part of the MAP is defining your priorities – what’s actually important to you. When you distil it, there are four main things you can spend your waking hours on: work, relationships, mind and body. Without thinking, most of us default to work as the first of these priorities, and it’s something we all seriously need to question.
Ironically, if you want to have a successful work year, you should prioritise the parts of your life that aren’t work – like your mind, relationships and body – so that you can bring your best and happiest self to the workplace. Our careers are a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s really time we started treating it like that.
Great years usually don’t just accidentally happen, they are planned out and worked towards. So if you want to finish 2025 in a better state than you entered it, start by creating your own MAP to get there.
Understand the meaning you derive from and outside work, define your anchors and decide what you want to prioritise, and the next 12 months have the potential to be your best yet.
Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
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