Willy Trolove: Aim to die wishing you'd spent more time in the office

According to the hoary old saying, nobody on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time at the office. Being alive isn't just about work, it's about friends, family and the good things in life, such as walking on beaches, dancing with the stars, and cutting your toenails.

Excuse me. For a moment there I forgot that the good things in life are personal. I've just cut my toenails and it feels good. You don't need to know this, but it helps to illustrate my point. You can't cut your toenails at work, unless you are a podiatrist.

Everyone wants more of their own time. We all wish we didn't have to work. If you took the hoary old deathbed saying to its logical conclusion, you wouldn't spend any time at the office at all. Your days would be filled with your own time.

But this is where things go awry. Your own time is only attractive because it is limited. The more you have, the less valuable it becomes.

If you don't have much, you fill it with high-quality leisure activities. You do stuff. You go places. You take family trips to The Warehouse. But if you have too much, you squander it. You slope around the house in your underpants and moccasins. You watch Paul Holmes on the telly. You spend your weeks waiting excitedly for the meter reader to pop around.

Your own time is a commodity just like oil, subject to the rules of supply and demand and monopoly control by greedy cartels. It's tradable. It's consumable. Someone else decides how much you have. You never think it's going to run out, but one day it will, and that day is the day nobody wants to think about.

There are, of course, some differences between your own time and oil. When you have an accident with your own time you don't foul the coastline, drown thousands of seabirds and bankrupt Lloyds investors. More importantly, if you don't have enough oil you need to get boring but if you have too much of your own time you get bored.

In fact, if you gave up work and gave your life over to your own time, you'd soon be so bored that you'd wish you were back at work wishing that you weren't at work.

And so the hoary old saying doesn't make sense. It's just one of those things that people say to fill a pause in the conversation when someone's on their deathbed. Of course we'd all like to spend less time at the office, but it isn't because we've got anything better to do. It's because work is rarely exciting.

Let's face it. Unless you are an astronaut or a Feltex executive, work tends to be mundane. For most people, it's the same thing day in, day out. The only variety comes when there's a fire drill, when your office chair spontaneously collapses, or when Michael in accounts goes on leave and comes back as Michelle.

This lack of variety is efficient and profitable, but it isn't natural. Humans have spent most of their evolution living far more exciting lives. Our ancestors battled sabre-toothed tigers and hunted wildebeest. They roamed the landscape in search of missionaries to eat. They consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms and believed they were turtles. Every day was filled with a magnificent variety, because every day was a struggle for survival.

The ceaseless repetition of office work is a recent ritual. It's only in the past few decades of human existence that we've spent our days putting numbers into spreadsheets, writing monthly reports, and flirting with the nice lady who comes around to spruce up the office pot plants.

Nowadays, our daily struggle is a struggle to stay awake between coffees, a struggle to battle the motorway traffic, and a struggle to choose an outfit that is different from everyone else's while being almost exactly the same.

But there's no need to get depressed about this. If your work is mundane, it's only because you allow it to be. Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to bring as much excitement and variety into your workplace as you can, and demand that your colleagues do the same.

Eschew the everyday. Banish the boring. Your work life will be more interesting and rewarding, and when you are on your deathbed you won't wish that you'd spent less time at the office, you'll wish that you'd spent more.

Is this an impossible dream? Probably. But it sure beats feeling good about cutting your toenails.