Lately, I find myself thinking more often about how I spend my time.

When I was in my twenties, I could afford myself up to 60 hours each week to do whatever I wanted, or nothing at all. Usually it was a pretty even split.

These days I have a lot more going on.

Sometimes this means I have to pick my spots.

Sometimes it means not doing everything I want to do, without giving up something else. The truth is that so often leaning in to one thing, means leaning away from something more important.

Increasingly I find it a lot more important to keep my priorities in order.

What matters to you?

Let’s assume that everything after today is a question mark. Not in a Tony D’Amato “six-inches-in-front-of-your-face” kind of way. Just that you don’t have a crystal ball, so it’s an unknown quantity.

Now, think about what you worked on yesterday. I don’t know what you do (and it’s none of my business), but just reflect on the work you did.

Are you proud of it? Are you pleased with it?

If the answer is no more than a handful of days in a row, it might be in your own best interests to step back and assess whether or not you should really be doing it at all.

What I’m about to say isn’t a popular message, but if I’ve learned anything as I’ve gotten older it’s that you really don’t have all the time in the world. So prioritize what’s important to you.

Know that you are not what you do..

When I was working my way through college, en-route to university, I worked a few jobs here and there around my studies. The most memorable of these was for a large chain of supermarkets here in the UK. It required that I would wake at 5am each Saturday, wrap up in two jackets, and enter a walk-in freezer ahead of the daily poultry delivery. I’ll spare you the details, but the job involved removing things from places by hand in temperatures so cold that I couldn’t feel my hands at all, which was probably for the best.

Every day in that job, as you might imagine, was in the no category.

..and that you should care about that.

We all need money. It buys food. It pays rent and mortgages. I can’t dispute that or skirt around it. That’s life. Most people need to work for a living.

But you can have a plan, and if you’re not spending your time on what you care deeply about, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not making one.

“You know the Greeks didn’t write obituaries, they only asked one question after a man died — Did he have passion?”

It’s easy for me to say these things

I work in software, and I love it. I like to think I’m good at it, and it’s a career that pays well in most parts of the world.

I’ve also been very fortunate. I knew early on in life that this was what I wanted to do, and that doesn’t happen for everyone. This is something that seems obvious, and yet it just didn’t occur to me until later in my career.

Have tools, will travel

I get to work with a lot of different people. Being a contractor (shameless self-promotion: you can hire me), I move between engagements more frequently than someone in permanent work might do.

I like this aspect of the job. I like meeting new people and getting new perspectives. I especially like being exposed to new methods and new ideas.

You get to know the people you work with on a daily basis. You have the same deadlines, the same objectives, the same obstacles. It’s only natural that you can empathize with others when you’re together in the trenches.

It’s usually at these times when it comes out. It’s often someone that’s been struggling in the job for a while, but not always. The words change, but the sentiment never does.

“I hate this. And it’s making me miserable.”

This catches you off-guard the first time you hear it

At first you’re not really sure you heard correctly. So you ask them to repeat themselves. So they sigh (there’s always a sigh), and then they say it again.

When you’re so passionate about something, it’s hard to see how someone else couldn’t be. But this shouldn’t be surprising at all.

So you rationalize.

You assure them that it’s been a rough project that will be over soon. They respond that it’s not the project at all, and that they’ve just never had that spark of enthusiasm that you have. But sometime in the past they heard the job pays well. We all need money.

I often hear people use the phrase “life’s too short”. In a sense that’s true, but to paraphrase Chris Rock, not if you make the wrong decisions.

I wish that I had a better response to this before, back when it came up. In the past I’ve tried to encourage people, to tell them to hang in there, that it’ll get better. Maybe it will. Really, I wish I had just told them the truth.

Life is too long to spend it doing something that makes you miserable.

Now, I don’t suggest that anyone ups and quits their job if they feel this way. Just, for your own sake, don’t sit on it. Make a plan.

Some years back I watched a film you may or may not have heard of called Serendipity. Not a great film by any stretch (sorry), but one scene that stuck with me is an extract from a letter read by Jeremy Piven: “You know the Greeks didn’t write obituaries, they only asked one question after a man died — Did he have passion?”.

Don’t get me wrong. My work isn’t the center of my life anymore, and while I realize it’s not for everyone, I consider myself blessed and incredibly lucky to have such a loving family occupying that top spot now.

Even so, no reason is good enough to spend the majority of your working years doing a job you hate.

In the end, you’ll hate yourself for doing it.

You may not get everything you want in life, but allow yourself this. You deserve this. Allow yourself passion.

You owe yourself a fair shot at having your life’s work be something you love.