Is This Working? What 100 people are saying about the world of work in 2025 - with Charlie Colenutt Artwork

Change Work Life

Join us on the Change Work Life podcast and let’s beat those Sunday evening blues! If the prospect of yet another five days at work gives you a sinking feeling on a Sunday evening, the Change Work Life podcast is for you. Through interviews with ordinary people who have taken action to change the path of their career, and the career coaches who helped them, host Jeremy Cline explores the changes you can make to enjoy a better working life, whether these changes are small alterations to day-to-day routines, major career shifts or something in between. For show notes, resources and lots of other great content visit https://changeworklife.com/

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Change Work Life

Is This Working? What 100 people are saying about the world of work in 2025 - with Charlie Colenutt

June 03, 2025 • Jeremy Cline/Charlie Colenutt • Episode 207

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#207: Charlie Colenutt spent three years interviewing people from all walks of life about their jobs. He explains what causes people to change their career, why most people stay at their current job, and how to find happiness in your career.

What you’ll learn

[01:30] Why Charlie wrote a book about the different jobs people do.
[04:28] The experience of having a career crisis.
[06:30] The problems with the professionalisation of modern life.
[11:04] How we expected Covid to affect people’s work lives, and what really happened.
[13:19] The pros and cons of working from home.
[16:00] Negative experiences people have working from home.
[19:10] How different generations view the workplace differently.
[24:46] The different aspects of control people have in their jobs.
[28:14] What causes people to change their career.
[29:39] Why most people don’t explore different careers.
[33:00] The increased challenge of applying for jobs and “career inelasticity”.
[35:00] Interviewing a Job Centre work coach.
[37:30] Why there’s been an increase of bureaucracy in the workplace.
[42:38] How to improve growth in the economy.
[44:00] How to find happiness in your career.
[49:40] Questions to ask yourself about your career.

Resources mentioned in this episode
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For the show notes for this episode, including a full transcript and links to all the resources mentioned, visit:

https://changeworklife.com/is-this-working-what-100-people-are-saying-about-the-world-of-work-in-2025/

Re-assessing your career? Know you need a change but don't really know where to start? Check out these two exercises to start the journey of working out what career is right for you!

0:00

What do people really think about their jobs? Are they satisfied? Dissatisfied? Do they feel like they've got control over the work they do? And what lessons can we learn from how others are feeling? That's what we're going to find out in this week's episode. I'm Jeremy Cline, and this is Change Work Life. Hello and welcome to Change Work Life, the show where we're all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. I'm a career coach, and in each episode, my guests and I bring you tips, strategies and stories to help you enjoy a more satisfying and fulfilling working life. What does work mean to us? How much control do we actually have over our careers? And are we all drowning in unnecessary bureaucracy and paperwork? Today, we're going to take the temperature of working life in the 2020s, and to help us do that, I'm delighted to be joined by Charlie Colenutt. Charlie spent three years interviewing 100 strangers from all walks of life about their jobs, and he's distilled those conversations into his new book, Is this

Working?: 1:17

The Jobs We Do, Told by the People who Do Them. Charlie, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for having me, Jeremy. So, I've got to start with the obvious question. Why did you write the book? It's a good question, and I think it's probably helpful if I take you back to where I was when I made the decision to write the book. And that was in March of 2021, and I was midway through a year-long pupillage, which is when you train to be a barrister. And I was doing it in commercial law, and I basically wasn't very happy. I was in the midst of those COVID lockdowns, spending most of my time in my flat or in an empty office, just staring at a computer screen, staring at PDFs, staring at long Word documents. And I had a sense of, oh my gosh, is this what the rest of my working life is going to be? Long hours looking at things that I didn't find particularly interesting. And at about that time, or maybe I think a few months before I had started that pupillage, I had read this book by the American oral historian Studs Terkel. And in the late 1960s and 70s, he had interviewed about 150 Americans from all walks of life, so steel workers and people that work in car factories and waitresses. And he had collected all these interviews together into a book called Working. And I was so taken with the book, I just thought it was completely fascinating. Everybody's got a story, and people seem to have the most extraordinary working lives and finding meaning and happiness in the most unlikely of places. And so, the confluence of those two things, being very unhappy in my job and thinking, oh gosh, what am I going to do with my life, is this really it, plus having read that book, I thought, well, surely now is quite a good time to repeat that experiment, given that the world that Studs had described through his interviews has completely changed since the 1970s, where now most of us work in the services economy doing jobs based on computers. The world of work is completely upended since then. So, I thought, kind of selfishly, if I repeated Studs' experiment and interviewed 100 people in today's economy, then I think, well, I would learn something about what I wanted to do with my life and perhaps will be given a steer in that direction. But also, there was the intellectual reason that I thought it would be fascinating to see how things have changed since the 1970s. I'm hearing parallels between that and why I started the podcast, because I was in a place where I was pretty unhappy with work. And so, I started a podcast, partly for my own benefit, to figure out what I might do. In your case, I mean, did it mean ditching the pupillage and then launching yourself entirely into writing a book? And so, yeah, where did you expect to end up? I didn't really know. So, I completed the pupillage just because I thought that would be a sensible thing to do. And I think my wife and my parents wouldn't have been too happy with me just running away immediately. And I may well go back to it, but I don't think I will. But it involved also moving out of London and recalibrating our lives, my now wife and I. But the idea was that I'd give myself, I had enough runway, as it were, in terms of finances, to do six months where I'd try and do as many interviews as possible, and then I would turn that into a book proposal, and then I would pitch that book proposal to publishers. And at that point, I should have a good sense of whether this is viable, and hopefully get a bit of money from them to carry out the rest of the project. So, there was no long-term plan, other than the first six months. But I mean, I just had the most rewarding experience talking to people. So, I'd sit down with them, usually for a couple of hours, usually in a kind of Wetherspoons or on Zoom or whatever. And people were so generous with their story and their time. And I don't know if you found the same, but when you're going through a kind of career crisis, that's probably too strong a word, there's a great ego to it. You think, no one else has ever had it as bad as me. This is so terrible. But getting out there and talking to people, even if it's in things that you have no previous experience with or probably won't go into in later life, it humbles you in that respect. Because you realise that, A, people have it far worse, and B, there are so many things out there that one could do. There are so many ways to make a living. You needn't obsess about a particular path or a particular route. I do want to dive into the content of the book, but before we do that, what knowledge or experience had you had of book writing and that as a means to make a living? I mean, it's one of those things where I suspect that 99.9% of books written don't... Well, they don't make people the big bucks. So, yeah, what was your background or your preparation to this? Six months of, right, I'm going to do this, and then pitch a book idea, and then see what happens? It's another good question. And I think, well, I had studied history at university, and I had done a master's in US history and was all set to do a PhD but stepped away at the last. So, to me, I saw this as very related to, well, it's an oral history project, I suppose, but perhaps more along the literary and fictiony end of that. Well, not fictiony, but it's not academic history. So, I had a sense of the broad themes that I'd be dealing with in terms of economic themes, political themes and ideas about the history of work from Marx to Foucault. But it was kind of going in blind in lots of respects. But I think one of the themes that comes out of it is that, today, we set a lot of store by credentials, and by what I think Martin Amis calls like the professionalisation of everyday life, where we can be so afraid of going into things because we feel we don't have the right credentials, and we don't have a master's in XYZ. But actually, there is a lot to be said for learning on the job, and indeed, throughout most of human civilisation, most learning has been done on the job. So, in that sense, it was perhaps naive in that I hadn't gone in with a particular training in the social sciences or anything like that. They've got all their techniques for doing objective and qualitative interviews and things like that. But I didn't want it to be a book that has the life sucked out of it by trying to make it a scientific endeavour. Instead, I wanted it to be something else, people talking about their jobs in their own words, in a way that you would perhaps hear in a conversation in the pub late into the evening where someone opens up about their story and about their experiences. I feel like in recent years the veil has been slightly lifted on this professionalisation. I'm seeing comments much more frequently how basically no one really knows what they're doing, and they're all pretty much just making it up as they go along, no matter what credentials they've got. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think it massively constricts the freedom of the labour market, that if people feel they can't go into a certain sector because they don't have the necessary credentials, then suddenly, changing careers becomes a two- or three-year process for you to get the necessary credentials before you go into something. So, my wife works in Early Years, where in the last 20 years there's been an enormous programme of professionalisation, where in order to look after X number of children you need to have this level of qualification. And the qualification often, the teaching and the requirements for that are pretty unrelated to the actual skill and craft of being a good Early Years worker. But it's become so necessary now, it's so part of the process that they're now struggling to get the amount of staff they need, because you need a C or C equivalent in maths and English in order to start your apprenticeship. And so, so many people that would have been great Early Years workers are turned off from it as a result. And I understand why you're doing it, because it's in the sector's interests to protect the profession. Law is a classic example of this, where if you want a high-status job that pays a lot, you make it very hard to enter, and you control the number of applicants and entrants. But I'm not sure it's good for the economy or for people. The idea that life should be a winding journey where you're not stuck in one path, but there's are other options out there for you. So, going back to when you started the project, what preconceptions or expectations did you have about what you'd find with all these interviews? And yeah, were those preconceptions actually matched with what you found? So, I think the big one was COVID, in that I started the interviews in 2021, and I finished them in early 2023 with bits of other work thrown in there, too. But I thought COVID would be this enormous event for people. You know, we were reading articles at the time about the Great Resignation or the Great Rethinking, where everyone, because their working lives have been so upended by working from home or taking time off because you've been furloughed, that everyone was completely rethinking their relationship with work. And actually, I found that it was the dog that didn't bark. There were certain people that had made changes. So, there was a restaurant manager, and the way they had designed their business completely changed as a result of COVID. They went into more ticketed experience style restaurant dining, rather than usual turn up on the door stuff. But I think it was a function of the fact that the people talking and writing about the Great Resignation and the Great Reflection were the knowledge workers of places like London and New York, where for them, their working life was completely disrupted by COVID. They're working from home, that was entirely new, et cetera. But actually, for a lot of people, for the carers I interviewed, for the postman, life went on much as usual. But yeah, I don't know whether it's a kind of Second World War thing, where there's a reluctance to talk about it because people have such kind of horrible memories about it. Or maybe it just wasn't that important to our working lives as we think, even though working from home is still massively important, and the fight about that is probably the largest fight in the knowledge economy offices of the current moment. It is interesting how, four years on, we still seem to be having this battle with what place does remote work have, where it is an option where you can do it, which, obviously, it's not an option for everyone. But should people be going back into the office? Should it be three days? That kind of thing, we seem to be see-sawing backwards and forwards. It's going to be quite interesting to see where we end up. To me, it's very much a life stage thing, isn't it? Where the benefits are so enormous, where if you've got young kids, and picking them up from nursery and dropping them off, that for people in that life stage, the thought of it being taken away is just so dramatic for them. And I suppose in earlier decades where people turned into work from the same employer for longer, there was a sense that there would be years, periods of five, 10 years, where you would give a huge amount to the company in your working hours, and that those years would then be repaid in other times of your life when you could perhaps give less, because you had young children at home. Whereas now, people tend to move around much more, certainly in knowledge economy jobs. So, that contract with the employer where you'd give more sometimes and less at other times has been broken. And so, for the employer's perspective, they see it only as a bad thing, because they feel you're not going to be contributing, and then you're going to leave at the end of that time if you're working from home. Something I didn't have really when I was doing my pupillage is that socialisation and that sense of apprenticeship that you get by being in the same room as more senior colleagues and your peers. And as we spend less and less time doing the associational activities, going to church and playing for communal sports clubs, and more and more time doing individual activities like consuming things on our phone, work has become the really, really important source of in-person relationships and friendships. And I feel like we don't know what we're losing if we design a way of work that avoids those by prioritising working from home, especially for those people in their 20s and 30s. So, yeah, I don't know, it's a really vexed issue, and you didn't even ask a question about it, but certainly, it goes either way in the book, where some people, I interviewed someone that worked in expert network sales, where they try and get experts for lawsuits and merge and acquisitions, and there they had this gamified sales system where every time they got an expert booked for their company, they would have a little ping, and it would come up with 'Well done on securing the commission', and you'd be able to see the leaderboards for who was getting the most commissions. And certainly, her experience of working from home was absolutely terrible, because she was locked in this Black Mirror type game, where she was working longer and longer hours but not really sleeping, not really eating, and made herself very unhappy as a result of that. But that's an extreme example, and most people lie somewhere in between. Yeah, I'm not yet convinced that in-office working is the complete necessity that some people make it out to be. I mean, there are fully remote companies which seem to have got it right from a social aspect as well. I think it's those companies where they were primarily office-based, and now they've been thrown into this thing, that it's almost like redesigning the company culture so that you can bring in the aspects remotely that you would ordinarily do in person. Having said that, since I left my job to go effectively self-employed, and most of my work is done from my home office, I now deliberately make sure that I do get out to in-person networking events, just because I know that seeing people in 3D really does make a difference to me, and that's quite important. So, yeah, I found, as we went back to the office, that it really was pros and cons either way. So, on the one hand, I saved a huge amount of time and money not commuting in, but on the other hand, it was quite nice to have those, showing my age here, the water cooler moments where you could just randomly talk about what was on TV last night. Yeah. And yeah, I think it's often much disparaged the idea of the water cooler. It's not done well since COVID, has it? With all the CEOs talking about water cooler moments, and all the young people saying, 'Outrageous! What does that even mean?' But yeah, I agree. I'd make the same point. It's that in a world where we seem to be socialising less and less, and that the workplaces remain pretty consistent as a source of those important relationships, and I know that's not ideal, and we shouldn't aspire to that world, there should be other stuff outside of that, but it's a world that we have, we should be careful about jeopardising those relationships. What did you pick up around generational differences in the interviews? So, there's this portrayal of this clash between Gen Z on the one hand, who according to the Gen Xers are all entitled and feel like they should get promoted within six months but don't work in the office and change jobs every three years or something like that. Interested to know what you learned about generational differences through the interviews you did. I felt that for Gen Z and the later Millennials, which I should say that I'm not sure quite what I am, I think I'm the first of the Gen Zs or the last of the Millennials or something like that, that there was a sense that expectations had been raised about what work should be. So, to give an example, there was a management consultant, and she had taken a job at a big management consultancy, and they had made lots of promises, the world's your oyster, you could do so many different projects here, you can work in all sorts of different sectors, and also we're a kind of inclusive company where you can bring your whole self to work, and we expect you to find this work meaningful and a big part of your identity. And then, she gets to the job. And so, a lot of that is coming from HR, in essence. And she gets to the job, and she finds that she has almost no control over where she's placed. And she has a series of very, extremely tedious placements where her work wasn't being seen by anyone. She was submitting these reports to a blank monolith and working from home most of the time. And then, she does some training with senior employees, and they do some workshopping of possible discrimination examples. And she raised an example where one of her clients had been making a series of derogatory comments about women in one of their calls, saying that they belonged in the kitchen or whatever. And she had raised this as an example of possibly sexist behaviour. And the seniors in her call had said, 'Well, you know, there's not really much we can do here, because we need to protect our relationship with the client, and it's really important that we don't upset them in any way that might jeopardise our contract with them.' And then, she said, from that point on, she just took the view that her work was her work, and she was going to give it, not the bare minimum, but she was going to work her hours and do her job well in those hours, but not really go the extra mile or compete for promotions in the same way as she had been doing previously. And so, I suppose the point I'm making is that the way we have talked about work in the last 10 years has been very much this idea that it's your route to identity and meaning, and that it's a place where you can feel welcomed, accepted and all of those things. And often, those things come up against hard business realities, which is what we're seeing now with the unravelling of all of the DEI stuff. And it's this gap between the expectations that were raised by perhaps HR or whomever and the realities of their experience of the job that makes people quite disillusioned and upset. Whereas I think, I don't know, but my sense is that, back in the day, there wasn't this level of expectation raising. So, that sense of, well, I had high hopes, and they haven't quite lived up to those, so I'm just going to carry on plodding along. And it seemed to be quite prevalent amongst the younger interviewees. And I think if you look at the data, there is a real sense that, actually, they're not as flighty and non-committed as people think, in that there's a real desire for them to find a company that they can stay at for 20-years-plus in these opinion polls. But obviously, that world doesn't really exist anymore. And then, finally added onto that, there is the housing issue, which I think has really came up a few times, in that if work doesn't pay enough for you to have a house large enough to start a family in, say, your late 20s, early 30s, then that bleeds into your relationship with work, in that there's a sense of, well, what am I doing this for? If I'm an engineer in London doing an important job that is socially useful, say I'm a civil engineer, and I can't afford a house within an hour's commute, then that to me seems to break down the contract that served the British economy so well for decades previously. But yeah, so that would be my read on the younger generations. Maybe I'm naive, but I'm quite surprised that those attitudes to sexist remarks are still available. I mean, what little I remember about employment law tells me that that particular person you were talking about could well have a claim against an employer. You mentioned control there, and that's a theme in your book, control or perceived lack of control. Can you talk a little bit more about that? I suppose it comes up in a number of ways. There's the autonomy aspect, where when you think about what a good job looks like and whether someone enjoys their job, usually, the key ingredient is autonomy in the way that they go about their tasks and the way they order their tasks. So, for instance, I interviewed, well, I think I ended up interviewing three cleaners, but not all of them appear in the book. Some worked for big cleaning agencies, and others were house cleaners that were essentially self-employed. And the self-employed cleaners were just profoundly happier, in that they could choose the order in which they cleaned the rooms, they didn't have someone breathing down their neck. And I think this is something we haven't quite picked up on about lots of manual jobs, is that with headphones and podcasts and things, you can listen to whatever you want whilst you're cleaning someone's house, and you can call people and speak to relatives whilst you're cleaning someone's house. And that's not something you can do as a call centre worker or similar jobs like that. And so, to me, that's a tremendous freedom of thought that you don't get in a lot of jobs. But being able to prioritise your own tasks is really important. If you had to compare that cleaner to a warehouse worker that I interviewed, who had worked at some of these big E-commerce warehouses, I'm sure you can picture as you drive past Milton Keynes, they're usually either side of the M1, but his job had been reduced to standing on a kind of mope on a tower, you have a tower of products wheeled up to you, and then you move the product from one place to another, and you scan it as you do so. And every hour or every half an hour, you have something on the screen that pops up and says, 'You've been working for an hour. Would you like 30 seconds of physical exercises or 30 seconds of mental exercises?' And the mental exercises are things like, 'Think a happy thought' and things like that. So, there you have work that has been completely stripped of that idea of autonomy, of that idea that you should have some freedom in the way you select and organise your work. So, that control in that sense is incredibly important. But there's also a wider sense of control, which is the control that we think we have over our career. And I suppose the way we have come to think about what the ideal career looks like is one that we're taught about in schools and you see on LinkedIn. And it's this idea that one should be very intentional and plan their career and think about what are my goals for the next five years, 10 years. And actually, I don't think I spoke to a single person who had done this exercise. In reality, most people basically will only change their careers if some crisis forces them into a new direction. So, whether that's someone having a breakdown, so I interviewed someone that was a carer and had a breakdown because they were working so hard and found it so emotionally draining, and then ended up becoming a cleaner and was profoundly happier afterwards, or if they've had some kind of injury or circumstances outside of their control, like being made redundant or given the offer of redundancy at a time when you're not happy and would like to take it. And that's the way that careers seem to change directions in the real world. Not this kind of optimisation of what are my skills, how can I exploit those for the most amount of financial value and benefits. And so, what are the implications of that fact that we are, by the sounds of it, quite passive victims of circumstance and fate? Well, I suppose it means that we should be perhaps a bit kinder to ourselves in where we end up. But also, if you are someone that is able to be that rationalising and optimising and planning person, then the world's your oyster probably, because nobody else is doing it. What's the reason for that? There is absolutely no shortage of knowledge and information out there. So, I can't see reasons beyond time and motivation for not exploring. I mean, I can probably type into YouTube, a day in the life of a bricklayer. I don't know if that's a career which interests me, and I'm sure I can come up with things. So, why is it that the default seems to be that these sorts of things, these sorts of changes only occur where there is this crisis moment? There are some very good YouTube bricklayers. It's actually quite the cottage industry on YouTube, actually. I think because it's a wider issue with information and the Internet, in that the traditional understanding is that it's all the world's information at our fingertips. What a brilliant opportunity! But not all information is the kind of information that will force you to take a positive step. A lot of it is information about risks and failure and where things have gone wrong for people. So, it's like the news cycle, where the more negative information we consume, the more afraid we become, and the more we retreat inwards within ourselves in our political views. I feel like the information on the Internet has a similar effect on our careers. So, is information making us risk averse essentially? Yeah, I think there's something in that, in that, A, there's so much of it that it's overwhelming, and B, if you're, say, looking to change career, then there's so much information about how to become a teacher that you're almost put off from making a decision on a whim. And perhaps that's what you need. You need some level of foolhardiness in making career changes. And providing the massive guides on how to do things, most people just see that and think, 'Oh gosh, I'm not sure. Too hard.' I was reading, I stumbled across 80,000 hours, have you heard of that organisation? Yes, I have. There's something to do with the sort of philanthropy. Effective altruism, that's the one, yeah. It's kind of careers guidance for effective altruists. And there, I was looking through the website, and there's so much information, and everything is referenced with the appropriate social science research about why this is the appropriate way to think about your careers to do the most good. And I'm Luddite, terrible person, but my response was, 'Oh my gosh, I can't face wading through all this information. It seems there's too much, it's too hard. Other people clearly will be better qualified than I will.' So, I also think related to this and related to the information point is that applying for jobs has just become a really onerous prospect since we've had online job boards and online portals, where now the costs and effort for you to submit a job application has become much lower than it used to be, where you had to get your CV printed or write handwritten cover letters and things like that, that now if you're applying for jobs, you're sending many, many, many more applications out. Some people are sending hundreds of applications out. So, for each open position, the employer is receiving hundreds of CVs and cover letters. And admittedly, a lot of those will not be particularly tailored or very good. But you can understand if you're thinking about switching into a new career, and you're seeing that people are posting on LinkedIn,'I made 500 applications for junior software development positions, here is the flowchart of where they went.' 400 went unresponded to, 100 got me through a recruiter sift, and then you get to one that gives you the offer, then yes, applying for jobs is now easier than it's ever been, but it's also harder because it's easier than it's ever been. So, I think there's something in that as well. But it's a massive issue, I think economists call this labour inelasticity, where people across the country are, in essence, quite risk averse and quite reluctant to change their careers, and often for very understandable reasons. But I think what the career changes in the book told me was that it mostly works out fine. Not changing is also a decision, and to stay in a job that is making you profoundly unhappy is a decision. You're deciding to accept that as your life. There was one extremely sad story where I interviewed a job centre work coach. So, the person that, if you are unemployed and getting what used to be JSA, I'm not sure if it's still that, you have to go and talk to a work coach every other week or so, to show that you've been applying for jobs. And the idea is that they'll be able to provide coaching for you on how to write your CV and cover letters so you can get a job. And perhaps 20, 30 years ago, that was possible because you had enough time to do that. But now, the appointments are 10-minute appointments, most of which consists of scanning the customer, as I think they're known, their customers' travel receipts, and then after that you check that they've been applying for jobs, and then they go away. There's no sense of coaching whatsoever. And previously, in his role at job centres, he'd done in-person coaching for job seekers where he had been given so much freedom and so much time and so much resource to design his own programme, and had a real success with that. And over the years, his autonomy had been whittled down, such that he was now doing these 10-minute appointments. And he said, 'I feel like a box ticker.' And what else? Oh, you can't get a quart in a pint pot, describing the amount of stuff that he was being asked to do in these 10 minutes. And he had had time off work because of various mental health issues that were primarily caused by his job. And yet, it was just such a clear example of someone that should have switched, should have gone and done something else, but felt that... I'm not sure, I'm not sure why he didn't. He said it kind of... Yeah, I'm not sure he ever gave a really good reason why he didn't. But think of what he could have done in terms of pursuing another path. But you can never judge anyone because you're not in their position. And also, economic circumstances are very important in terms of, if you're leveraged to the hilt, as we seem to increasingly be, where if you've got a couple, both of whom are taken on four times their salary in a mortgage, then the options seem much narrower, and caution and staying in place seem much more sensible. You touched there on something else, which I promised in the intro we'd cover, and that's the bureaucracy side of things that just seems to have increased. What did you find in that regard in all these interviews you did? So, I think it was a general thing that kept popping up, in that you would speak to people that are on the operational level, I think you'd call it, so say a midwife or a carer or a teacher, and they would describe their job in two halves, where they would have, on the one hand, the concrete side to their job, which is providing the services that they'd signed up for. So, for the teacher, this is standing in front of a classroom. For the midwife, it's obviously caring for mothers. And then, they would have this shadow side to that concrete part of their job, which is the administrative work that goes along with it. And they would say,'Oh, gosh, yeah, I love the actual, the bits of my job that I feel are the bits I signed up for. I love being in front of a classroom, I love providing care to mothers. But it's all the paperwork, it's all the fact that every time that I give a massage to a mum, I have to turn around and write down on a piece of paper - massage given with consent, patient reports, good relief from pain.' Or the teacher would say, 'I'm spending most of my time responding to emails from senior management or doing data dumps of the grades of my students.' And then, you would talk to someone that has been in the workplace for a very long time, so I interviewed a matron who had done 50 years' service in the NHS, and she was saying that this record keeping requirement had gone up massively over the last few decades, where things are now, because you now have computers on the wards, there is a general expectation that your notes should be much more detailed, because it's easier to do them on a computer, therefore we should write more things down, therefore we avoid risk because we are making sure that, I don't want to swear, but we're covering ourselves, as it were. And so, what linked all these things together was that often it was the product of technology, in that having computers on the wards, or for instance, when it comes to, say, lawsuits, the length of documents has been going up and up and up, because they're all being written on the computer. And that has this level of abstraction where if you put a 400-page pleading for a court case in front of a judge 30 years ago, they would say, 'What on earth is this!? This is horrendously long.' But now in a PDF, there's a way it gets stripped down, and you forget that it's 400 pages. And that in paper terms, that would be a monstrous thing. So, that was a pattern that I noticed again and again. And a lot of it comes back to this fear thing that we have talked about, where it's managers wanting oversight of what their employees are getting up to. For teaching, a lot of the time it seems to be related to Ofsted, where headteachers are so worried about having a kind of big public failure, because you have an Ofsted that's uploaded to the Internet, and everyone will see that your school isn't outstanding. And so, this trickles down to employees then, who then have to keep assiduous records of everything they do, and that takes them away from their job. The midwife that is writing very detailed records about the massages she's given, in that time is not able to support the patient. The teacher that's spending her evenings doing these data dumps or replying to emails from even parents now, I think that's the current thing, is not preparing for lessons for tomorrow or resting. So, there needs to be a general acceptance that when midwives are doing that and when teachers are doing that, they become worse at delivering the services that they're actually there to deliver. And so, therefore, the things that you're getting them to write down records to avoid, A, in the case of midwives litigation, B, in the case of teachers a bad Ofsted, become even more likely because your staff morale is worse, and they've got less time to actually do the work that they have signed up for. So, that was a persistent theme that I wasn't expecting, actually. I was expecting it to be, I didn't go out to set out to write a book about bureaucracy and admin, but that seemed to come up a lot. And I think if anyone, if Keir Starmer or Labour government are looking at how to improve growth, don't start by interviewing, talking to CEOs and the regulators about things that they could do. Talk to nurses on the wards, talk to teachers about the specific regulatory and admin burdens that they have and how you can get rid of those, would be my advice, not that it counts for much. I saw a comment from someone which was something along the lines of asking a regulator how to achieve growth is like a car asking the brake how to go faster. Yeah, it wasn't very politically astute, I don't think. A lot of what we've talked about, I think, is a product of things that have evolved at a societal level. And maybe there are things which politicians can do to improve the situation which most people are not going to have any influence on. One piece of optimism I've gleaned from this conversation was your statement that people who have actually changed careers have found that generally it's worked out okay. I'm just wondering, from an individual level, what else did you pick up that the individual can take away that's going to improve their lot? What's the sort of, I don't know, secret sauce to career happiness or something that you noticed that you thought, 'Why don't people do this? I reckon if they did this, they'd be a lot happier"? Well, I think one source of optimism was that one's happiness, I mean, we know all this, it's the stuff that Jesus is talking about many thousand years ago, that wealth and status are not what makes you happy at work. Or at least that seems to be uncorrelated in the interviews I did. There seems to be no correlation between wealth and status beyond a certain level, as we know, and happiness in your jobs, in your work. So, that's a profoundly optimistic thing, that if your work can achieve that standard of living or a certain career, and you're happy doing it, then yeah, it's open to everyone in essence. On an individual level, and related to that, I suppose it's a question of perspective, and it comes back to this idea of the concrete part of your job versus all the other stuff, all the other frippery, that the people that seemed happiest were the ones that were able to lose themselves in the tasks in front of them, rather than thinking about the abstract things like status and what other people will think and how much I'm earning. So, practical steps, what can you do? Have you heard of a thing called, what's it called, a task or time diary or something like that, where you make a diary of all the things that you do each day. In terms of personal advice, and I suppose with the qualification that you shouldn't accept any career advice of someone that's under 30, I would say that it comes back to what we were talking about earlier with this idea of the concrete side of your job, which is the parts of the job that you signed up for, and the abstract, other stuff. The people that seemed happiest were those that had come to realise that the abstract stuff is secondary to the concrete stuff. So, I'll give an example where I interviewed a teacher who was thinking about leaving the profession, I think she'd been doing it for 10 years or so, because she was so fed up with all of the peripheral stuff, the hours she was spending marking late into the evening, the email management, inbox management, all of that kind of stuff. But she absolutely loved standing in front of the classroom and teaching. And she had the realisation that she couldn't leave teaching because she saw herself as a teacher and because she loved that experience of being in front of a class and the experience of them understanding things and making connections in their head. I think she was an English teacher. And so, she said to herself, 'Okay, well, I'm going to redesign my work around the teaching and try and cut out as much of the extraneous stuff as I can.' And so, she started doing in-class marking, where she'd walk around and look at five or six books and see if all the students were making the same mistake, and then stop everyone and give generalised feedback right there and then. She removed email from her phone. She basically stopped replying to a lot of management's requests. And this has had consequences where comments have been made saying that she used to be much more of a team player and things like that, but fundamentally, it had allowed her to carry on teaching when she was thinking about leaving. So, that's probably a good example of one should try, when you're thinking about your job, turn it into a kind of collection of tasks and then categorise those tasks by what is the actual purpose this is serving and how does doing this task make me feel in the moment, and then prioritise and deprioritise in that basis. Because I think, often, we forget that a job is a collection of tasks that we spend all day doing, and we think about the job title, the status that it carries and things like salary, which are all important, but not as important as the tasks that we spend our day doing. So, that would be my advice, take it or leave it. But I think it's been helpful for me in that I've been making career decisions about what to do with my life going forward now, having written the book, and I've decided to go into academia, to go back to university and do a PhD, and to become a historian, hopefully. And that was through looking back through my various professional experiences and realising that the time that I've enjoyed most is the time spent teaching, time spent in libraries researching, and the time spent writing. And setting aside, you almost have to think, what would I do if nobody was watching me or nobody was looking at me? My conclusion was, well, I need to do a job that combines those three. And I know lots of academics will be saying, 'Don't, don't do it', but I think I thought about it, and I think it's going to be okay. There's that classic question, if you didn't have to worry about being paid for it, then what is it that you do? And taking some clues from there. And I guess that taking your own lessons there, it's looking at the different aspects of the job and seeing how much you can focus on those particular ones that you enjoy. Because I suspect in academia, there's probably a whole lot of bureaucracy, grant writing applications, for example, is coming to mind. So, it's going to be almost like doing that time audit and seeing what's the stuff that you can drop or at least limit. A very simple thing, one of the best decisions I ever made was turn off email notifications. Marvellous. Emails don't need to be responded to immediately. Yeah, yeah. I was reading this very strange but very interesting book by this guy called Lewis Mumford, who's this American architect, I think it's called Technics and the Human Civilisation. But there's a long discussion in that, it's written in the 1920s, and there's a long discussion about how the telephone is killing modern work, because it's disrupting the rhythm of our working lives and filling it with interruptions that disrupt us from the tasks that we should be getting on with. And yeah, I was thinking, gosh, if the phone is what's doing that, what is Slack doing? What is email doing? All of these things. The great challenge is maintaining our attention in the face of all of these things. So, we've talked a bit about advice for the individual. What resources can you recommend that you've come across, that either you found particularly helpful or that might help the listener? I play quite a lot of tennis, and there's a very good book called the Inner Game of Tennis. And I think, generally, sport is a very good way to practice the things that we should be doing in the rest of our lives. And I think it's written in the 70s by this guy called Timothy Gallwey, and it basically applies a mindfulness approach to tennis. And before I think it was even called mindfulness. Where it's all about an idea that you come across quite a lot in psychology, that there are two selves. There's the analytical self, and then there's the intuitive, in-the-moment self. And Gallwey's thesis is that the analytical self should not be present whilst you're playing tennis, and that it often leads to self-criticism, to your head being full of judgement about what you're doing in the moment. And when you're judging yourself and criticising yourself, you're tensing up, and you're not playing good tennis. And there are obviously lessons there for the rest of life, in that it's that judgmental self which is often informed by other people's perceptions more than anything else, 'is this what I should be doing, what will people think, you're doing this terribly', is just profoundly unhelpful for so much of life. And so, the constant pursuit of trying to be in that intuitive, in-the-moment zone or flow or whatever you want to call it, is one of life's great challenges, especially in the tennis court. But yeah, and one of his things is, you'd never talk to anyone else like you talk to yourself, and you see people hitting themselves with their rackets or saying, 'You idiot! You idiot! How have you done that!?' And that's seen as acceptable on the tennis court when you're talking about yourself, but obviously, you would never talk to anyone else like that, I would hope. So, that's my advice. It's a very good, short read, and applies to much of life beyond tennis. And if someone wants to find you, or more importantly, find the book, where should they go? So, all major booksellers, I

suppose. Is This Working?: 53:28

The Jobs We Do, Told by the People Who Do Them, by Charlie Colenutt. And I also publish newsletters on Substack, and the title of that newsletter is The Administration of Things. Right. I will put the links in the show notes. Charlie, thank you so much for coming on. It sounds like it was a fascinating project, and I've been really interested to learn about your findings. So, thanks so much for coming on and sharing. Thank you very much, Jeremy. Okay. Hope you enjoyed that interview with Charlie Colenutt. I don't know about you, but I thought it was really fascinating what Charlie has found out through these interviews with 100 different people. And I've got to say, based on his research, things just sound a little bit more fragile than perhaps I realised. There seems to be a lot of caution, and that's at two levels. You've got caution in the individuals who are reluctant to make any changes to their career. Charlie mentioned how there tends to be some kind of a crisis which really sparks that. And then, you've got caution at the level of the employers, which manifests itself in perhaps excessive record keeping, which adds to the bureaucracy and takes people away from their jobs. But despite a lot of Charlie's findings, I remain optimistic. And I say that for two reasons. One was the point that Charlie made, that those people who have changed careers, for them, generally, it's actually worked out pretty well. The second is that if you're listening to this podcast, then you probably appreciate better than most people that you've got more control over your career than perhaps most people realise. As there seems to be more uncertainty in the world, it kind of makes sense that, for each and every one of us, it's our responsibility to take care of our own well-being and career satisfaction. Because frankly, no one else is going to do that for us. This isn't a new point, but the heightened uncertainty that we've all experienced since the COVID pandemic kind of throws this into sharper relief. At least it does for me. It's almost like you create your own certainty when no one else is going to be able to create that for you. The transcript, summary of the key points from the episode and links to the resources mentioned are all on the show notes page for this episode at changeworklife.com/207, that's changeworklife.com/207. And if you're looking for a way to start taking control, then check out the exercises on my website at changeworklife.com/happy. That's changeworklife.com/happy. Those exercises will start to give you some ideas as to what you need out of your career. If you're in that place where you're just not really fulfilled with your job, but you're not sure why, then those exercises are a great starting point. There's more to come in two weeks' time. So, if you haven't subscribed to the show, make sure you do. And I can't wait to see you in two weeks. Cheers. Bye.