Lesson Two: More Craft, Less Chores

I’ve always struggled with the idea of work-life balance. That’s not because I’m a workaholic or don’t value my leisure time. Instead, it’s because I work for myself. What counts as “work” and what counts as “leisure” is harder to separate when I make my own schedule and don’t get paid by the hour.

For instance, when I read a book that really interests me and then write about it later—was the reading work or fun? What if I had to read the book for research? What’s different between the drawings I do for fun and those I use on this blog?

Perhaps I’m an isolated case, but I’d like to think not. In the years Cal Newport and I have run Life of Focus, I’ve interacted with dozens of students who struggle with work and play being intermixed in both their time at home and their time formally allocated to an employer.

The situation is even more complicated for retirees, students, academics, and stay-at-home parents, many of whom aren’t “paid,” strictly speaking, for many things that clearly seem to be work.

Recently, however, I’ve stumbled into a distinction I think matters more than the one between work and life: that between craft and chores. While work seemingly embodies everything you must do to earn a living, and life is everything else, craft is all of the productive activities that utilize your creativity and skill in order to accomplish something you’re proud of, and chores are all the tasks that must be done to keep on going but don’t satisfy this same desire.

Maximize Craft Instead of Balancing Work

One thing I like about this revised approach is that it shifts the goals for our productive lives.

Working nonstop is not desirable. Burnout is real, and even if you love your job, pressure to perform continuously can be exhausting. If you add to that all the commitments you have outside of work, even a dream job can become a millstone around your neck if you aren’t careful.

Yet “balance” is definitionally hard to achieve.

Balance is akin to Aristotle’s maxim that virtue is to be found in moderation—except everyone’s definition of moderation is different. What’s a moderate amount of eating? Drinking? Going to the office? We end up falling back on cultural norms, where 9 to 5 is considered “balanced” even though a full-time job can be exhausting if you also have full-time childcare duties. And different cultures may have entirely different standards, in fact China’s infamous 9-9-6 start-up culture was sold as being *more* balanced than the nonstop-work ethic promoted at more aggressive firms.

In general, it’s easier to optimize a dimension of life by maximizing for something than by balancing between two extremes.

Given this, I prefer the idea of maximizing craft and minimizing chores across *both* my working life and personal life. I’d like to write more essays and spend less time filing taxes in my work, just as I’d like to finish more paintings and spend less time doing dishes at home.

How Do You Maximize Craft?

Definitions are nice, but how do you actually do this? Clearly, there will always be unavoidable chores both at work and at home. Spending more time on craft, while nice-sounding, can be hard to achieve in practice.

I believe the answer comes down to focus. In your work, if you can carve out regular chunks of time for deep work, you’ll start automatically shifting your work toward the dimension of “craft” and away from “chores.” In the beginning, that shift might come from simply being more efficient with the chores, even if their quantity hasn’t diminished. But, eventually, as you build “craft” accomplishments, it becomes easier to delegate and avoid chores in favor of more time spent on your craft.

We tend to specialize at what we regularly do, and if you spend your time on deep work, it creates a gravitational pull towards more deep work. Likewise, getting really good at chores makes you the person who gets assigned more chores.

At home, things are not quite as simple. Short of hiring an army of help, many chores will need to be done. But here, too, steps to maximize craft often succeed by squeezing out the hours spent on activities that are neither necessary chores nor meaningful crafts—the filler time spent endlessly scrolling on our phones or watching television shows we don’t even enjoy.

In the previous lesson, I argued that this year should be a year for doing something big—actually finishing a project you’ve had in mind for some time. Now, I’d like to encourage you to go further, to think about maximizing the feeling of craft throughout your life. Doing activities that require full engagement, genuine skill and give you a feeling of satisfaction when they’re completed.

In the next lesson, I’ll share a simple model for how to think about focus. In particular, what you can do to overcome some of your own internal resistance to maximizing craft and achieving big things. And on Monday, January 27th, I’ll reopen Life of Focus, my three-month course co-taught by Cal Newport. Stay tuned!