As we wrap up exploring the Meaning Pathway of the PERMAH model, this week we’ll be focusing on how you can craft more meaning and purpose into a task.
“The secret to effective crafting is recognizing and working with, rather than against, your motivation circumstances and freedom.”
– Rob Barker
The Art of Crafting Meaningful Tasks
Chances are good that at one time or another you’ve changed up the typical approach to a task to better suit you. Whether you took a different approach, changed an interaction pattern, or refined how you thought about a task, you were crafting more meaning and purpose into tasks in ways that boost engagement, satisfaction, resilience, and thriving.
The five core crafting factors include What, Who, Why, Where, and When.
Fortunately, crafting does not involve adding more hours to your day. Instead, effective meaning-crafting strategies might be the key to finding and unlocking your time and energy. The secret to making crafting a sustainable habit and routine way of tackling tasks is to pause when you plan, especially for tasks you dread – ask yourself: what, who, why, where, and when might this task be more meaningful?
Meaning-crafting is approaching a task you don’t particularly love but know is good for you or that you have no choice but to get done and pairing it with a secondary task or motive that gives you a deeper sense of personal satisfaction, motivation, or reward
For example, I was a runner. Having a race on the calendar to train for kept me motivated to run consistently. Due to some injuries, I had to do less running and more walking. I don’t enjoy walking as much as running, so I did some meaning-crafting and included my dogs in my walks. It makes a huge difference in my motivation because it’s satisfying to me to see how happy they are taking long walks with me. I consistently craft using the where factor to explore different scenery.
Some other examples of meaning crafting could include pairing cooking with listening to a podcast you love or doing squats while you catch up on your favorite show.
Meaning-Crafting Can Help You Build Better Habits
When you start attaching more meaning to the tasks you engage in, you give yourself the positive reinforcement you need to know that these tasks help you feel fulfilled. This positive feedback loop creates the motivation and momentum you need to stick to a habit for good.
When you meaning-craft your tasks, you’re more likely to enjoy, or at least tolerate, the things you can’t seem to naturally motivate yourself to do.
The key to behavior change is to:
- Start tiny by creating a tiny meaning-crafting habit and choose one task each day or week to make it more meaningful.
- Be willing to experiment and play with the different forms of task crafting. You don’t need to tick every factor. Try aligning your strengths one day, then change locations another day.
- As you continue crafting, discover what’s working well, where you’re struggling, what you’re learning, and how you want to adjust your crafting approach.
Keep going, keep growing…
Related posts:
How To Start Living Your Life More Meaningfully
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