The Self-Designed Job

Surely a Self-Designed job is one important part of any Self-Designed life.

Suppose you had a Self-Designed job. As a minimum, let's make it a job that assured the minimum wage to start, with prospects of more depending entirely on your performance.

What else would make it Self-Designed?

How about total freedom in the arrangment of the hours you put into that job. You can work a steady schedule of....let's say 30+ hours per week, on average, averaged over a 10-year career span. Why a 10-year career span? I read somewhere that the average person has five different careers in their life, and I'm assuming they work, more or less, from the age of 20 until 70. (Given a Self-Designed job, you might well keep working longer.) If you choose to go on to your next career earlier than 10 years, you must first make up any shortage of hours. there's no maximum set on how many hours you can work in a week. That's up to you. And actually, probably all our needs and wants could be well-provided for if a lot of paper-pushing jobs were eliminated and we all worked just 20 hours per week.

Now, what do you do? It has really not been that long that people have been doing jobs as narrowly defined as they are today, has it? Up until the industrial revolution, a very large proportion of us had to be farmers, and there's a lot of variety in a farmer's work, particularly the work of a diversified farmer, one who grows both crops and animals. As for the rest of us, another large proportion kept the home going, raising kids, cooking, cleaning. And another large proportion were makers of one sort or another. Hardly anybody had a desk-type job.

But the industial revolution did, after all, happen. There is, however, a way to get around it. You may have already heard of the concept of a "Portfolio career". That's when you set out to equip yourself with a whole set of skills with which to go about earning a living, and you use all of them at once or at least often enough to stay current. You do some of this and some of that, maybe more of this one week and more of that the next, maybe more of this one day and more of that the next. The down side, of course, is the benefits that employers offer in order to induce you to sign up for a full work week doing just one kind of work. Is it worth it?

One more aspect, of course, is doing a job you enjoy doing. And the big question there is, if we all do that, do all the jobs that really need doing get done, and is there enough market for the jobs that people like doing? More on that in another posting.

And as usual, I hope that my readers, assuming I have any (I need to figure out how to add my Statcounter code to the code of my blogsites), will comment and discuss.