Work is sometimes seen as a burden. Hubert Joly described it in The Heart of Business as "a chore, punishment, means to an end. Something you do so you can do something else."

Societal norms and popular culture lead us to believe that good, honest work needs to be inherently effortful. It's why we call it "hard work." It should be drudging and laborious, so we can reward ourselves with rest and fun afterward. We are skeptical when our work is too enjoyable. If it's enjoyable, we're perhaps not working hard enough. Maybe we're not doing it right. 

Instead of ensuring that work is hard and effortful, what if we aimed to make our work more enjoyable and effortless?

How are we making work unnecessarily hard? How are we getting in our way?

When we remove those obstacles, we can achieve a flow state where time passes super fast and we feel an effortlessness in doing our work.

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Outside of work, we often have fun in our spare time. We assume the fun we have needs to be relaxing and effortless. Afterall, we've spent so much of our effort doing hard work at our jobs.

Laura Vanderkam shares that there can be two types of fun - effortful fun and effortless fun. And they make us feel differently about how we are using our time. Effortless fun requires virtually no effort to do and no plan to do it - like watching TV or scrolling through social media. Effortful fun requires a bit of work - planning to go out with friends, cooking a meal, reading a book, joining a group activity for a hobby. Both types of fun are legitimate and necessary. 

What's interesting is that effortful fun is much more memorable and meaningful for us than effortless fun. Yet it is easy to overlook effortful fun because it kind of resembles work, so we choose more often to have effortless fun.

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We associate "effortful" with work and "effortless" with fun.

What if we flipped them as a way to upgrade our lives and work?

We can aim for our work to be more effortless. We can aim to have more effortful fun.

It doesn't need to be 100%, all-the-way effortful or effortless. We can benefit from simply more. Perhaps it is 10% more. Maybe it is 50% more. Only you will know what balance works best for you. And it might require some experimentation.

Whatever the percentage you arrive at, effortful fun and effortless work both provide us with more meaning and depth. 

It's perhaps a different perspective to see how we can navigate our work and non-work lives.

We can ask ourselves: 

How can we make our work more enjoyable and effortless? 

How can we add more effortful fun into our spare time?

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