I remember a poster on the cube wall of a coworker a few years ago that posed a question something to the effect of “if a tool performs the task, is it still work?” To put it another way, as an information worker automates more and more of the daily mundane tasks with less and less human intervention required, at what point do those element of the job description stop being “work”?

I’m going to venture an opinion that “work” is much like a stream. You can step in the same stream but it’s never the same twice, the water moves on. Over time, we can hope to find ways to minimize the mundane, but the stream is always moving. The repetitive can be automated, but technology and tool sets are always changing, and our focus naturally looks to ways to link together automation in a way that’s repeatable and measurable. The work at hand becomes more a function of looking for patterns then finding and implementing tools that add value in the simplest repeatable and maintainable way possible. Leveraging the work of others.