Like all but 20 percent

How to figure out if a job is worth keeping

What’s an acceptable ratio of positive to negative feelings about a job?

Someone posed that question not long ago, and it got me thinking. In my younger years, I might have said that this ratio should be infinite — that is, you should like absolutely everything about your job, and dislike nothing.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that disliking zero is going to be tough to pull off, even in almost ideal situations. We are seldom 100 percent happy in life. You can be sitting on a tropical beach, watching a beautiful sunset while sitting next to the love of your life and still be thinking “hmm, my toe itches. I have to go to the bathroom.” Such is the human condition. You can love your job and still find your weekly meeting with Dave from accounting tedious. But Dave isn’t quitting and neither are you and so here we are.

Nothing is perfect

I’ll also note that sometimes we think the problem is with the job and it turns out to be more… internal. I have followed some situations where people have quit jobs because they just can’t trust their co-workers and they’re always crashing right before deadlines. Then they find a different job and it turns out you can’t trust these co-workers either and they’re still always crashing right before deadlines and maybe, just maybe, these two situations have something very specific in common. Namely, the person experiencing them.

That said, you have to balance the reality that nothing is perfect against the truth that, as far as we know, you only get one life. It would be one thing to be miserable, day in and day out, if you were assigned a job at age 20 and required by law to keep it until retirement.

But we don’t live in a society like that. There are millions of jobs out there. Many are currently open. Within any given industry, companies have vastly different cultures from others. Within any company, some departments are probably a lot better to work for than other departments, to say nothing of individual managers. And if you can’t find a company you like, there are lots of ways to start your own business. Sometimes people who earn a lot of money believe they have to accept certain things about their jobs. But the labor market isn’t totally efficient, and so most people haven’t completely optimized on any dimension. That means that even if you earn a lot now, it’s always possible that you’ll be able to find a job you like more that pays more too. You might be able to find a job you like more that’s more flexible as well. You might be able to find a job that pays more and features nicer colleagues. You just don’t know until you look.

An hour or two a day

To strike a balance between the truth that nothing is perfect and the truth that no one deserves to be miserable, I’ll put 20 percent out there as a target to aim for. You want to like all but the equivalent of one day a week at your job. As few people actually shunt all the work they don’t like to one day, in practice it will be more like an hour or two a day of stuff that you’d generally prefer not to be doing. You might try keeping track of your time and seeing where the percentage lies currently.

If it’s over 20 percent that doesn’t mean you need to quit, Jerry Maguire style. The first thing you should do is see if you can craft your job to spend less time on the things you really don’t like. Do they actually have to be done? Maybe they don’t. Or maybe they can be done with less fanfare than they’re currently getting. Or maybe the load can be shared, or delegated. Maybe they can be done more quickly or more efficiently. You meet with Dave from accounting for 30 minutes rather than 60.

You can also try doing more of the stuff you really do like, which at least pushes the proportion down. I’m not suggesting extending your hours, but if you do have a lot going on, you become less available for tasks that wouldn’t be your first choice. People start asking you less, or you find ways to spend less time on them. Time is elastic that way.

But if the proportion is quite a bit over 20 percent, then it’s time to really look at life and figure out what you can do. There’s no harm in reaching out to old contacts, setting up some coffees, and so forth. Indeed, people should be doing that regularly even if they love their jobs! But it might flush out some new opportunities somewhere better. Work doesn’t have to be a negative thing in life. It can in fact be a source of joy — at least 80 percent of the time.