Work vs Going to Work

Ihave decided to go back to my old ways of offering free grammar sessions in an ICT publication more as always was the case to break the monotony of geek speak but also because am allowed.

The new Zoom buzzwords are “work from home” and “remote working” which have come to be after the world, that believed it had an answer to everything, lost yet another battle with Mother Nature resulting in people being unable to “go to work”.

So, what exactly is the meaning of the word “work”?

As a Noun: Activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.

As a Verb: Be engaged in physical or mental activity in order to achieve a result; do work.

Mental Effort or Activity

For someone who, for example, mixes concrete at a construction site work is a physical effort or activity which therefore makes it clear when they say they are going to work but what of someone, such as an accountant or lawyer who mainly apply mental effort or activity, mean when they say they are going to work?

In the former case, we are looking at what is usually referred to as a blue-collar activity while the latter is a white-collar activity, note that this literally referred to the colour of the collar of your work cloths. Before you get hot under the collar, yes, even that pink shirt you wear to work is probably white as well as the flowery scarf tied around your neck, there, gender balance achieved.

As a mainly agrarian nation on most mornings, many of the citizenry pick up their “jembes” as well as “pangas”, and go to work in their “shambas”, so it seems that the same mind-set went to our neo-modern environment. This is total disconnect considering that in gardens where we must go to and work is not like the other places we have claimed to go to work. We always have our mental faculties with us, I want to assume, but I could be mistaken.

Catalyst for Change

Therefore, if I have my mental faculties with me should it not be possible for me to work always irrespective of where, on or off the earth, I might be? Now with Covid-19, having a field day across the world such a question seems so mundane yet for over 50 years it has not been asked and so today when we do, we call and therefore, what we are practicing now must be the normal.

From as early as the age of 3 years many of us started a routine, wakeup (some as early as 4 am), shower, dress, have breakfast then dash off to a building where our parents strongly believed that knowledge resided in the same way as their illiterate grandparents believed when they sent our parents to school.

After many years of this routine we “graduated” from one institution to another, this one called employment, but the routine never changed we still went to a specific place to carry out a mental activity.

So, ask yourself, as a leader in the ICT space, have you been a catalyst for change or a hindrance towards making work the mental activity it needs to be as opposed to a headcount at eight activity?

The time has come for a mental mind shift into the information and, hopefully before the next pandemic, into the knowledge realm, sadly I am finding it difficult to hold my breath on this one as I expect us to revert back to “normal” as soon as the pandemic is over as if nothing had happened.