The sad truth is that it takes hard work to gain and maintain a solid relationship with money. Unless, of course, you happen to have relatives who are both wealthy and generous. Unfortunately none of my relatives had the good sense to be born rich so I can’t count on them to enlarge my fortunes.

As a child, I had a flirtatious relationship with money; mostly the kind that jingles in your pocket. I reluctantly did a very few chores and my parents reluctantly paid me a very few dollars. The point (as I later explained to my own children) was to teach me the value of money. What I actually learned (and what my children explained to me) was that an allowance didn’t go very far. When I was old enough to seek a summer job, I took work at a local amusement park cleaning the attractions.

I learned a lot that first summer. I learned that people aren’t very careful about what they eat or about what they ride or about what they ride after they eat. I learned that you can never have too much hamster litter. And I learned that work is hard.

It was all worth it, though, when I got my first check and realized that I could easily pull down a four-figure income every two weeks if I could solve the trivial problem of working more than twenty-four hours per day. If I had to stick to the usual eight-hour-per day schedule I’d be lucky to clear a hundred bucks.

On the upside, that experience clearly pointed out the value of getting some kind of post-high school education. So long as I stayed clear of a philosophy degree, I had a decent shot at a escaping my job as a pixie-dust spreader on the Tilt-A-Whirl.

In time (a lot more time than I care to admit) I earned a degree in Elementary Education. This isn’t the kind of degree you normally associate with wealth-building. You’re not likely to see faculty parking filled with BMWs, Jaguars, and Mercedes. And you never hear a faculty lounge discussion about how hard it is to find good servants these days.

Not that I’m complaining about my career choice. Being an educator has taught me a lot; like how to manage my money very, very carefully. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally found a money management scheme that is both simple and effective. It requires almost no effort on my part and has been enormously successful. You can apply my techniques for yourself. All you have to do is be married to my wife.

Really.

Well, not really, she’s already married and her current husband — me! — wants to keep her to himself. Which is your loss, because in addition to being a wonderful wife and mother, she is an awesome financial manager. When she took over our budget, she whipped it into shape like a Drill Sergeant transforming a group of corn-fed farm boys into deadly soldiers. If she could have ordered the budget to drop and give her twenty push-ups she would have.

She started by working out a budget. All of the financial advice books say that you should start with a budget that outlines how much money you bring in and how much you expect to spend. I never really understood the point of this because all it ever showed is that I needed more money than I had.

When I was in charge, I tried budgeting a few times. By the time I laid out the vital expenses (food, shelter, satellite TV) and the important expenses (transportation, video games, movie tickets) there wasn’t anything left for the optional expenses (education, insurance, and retirement savings.) My wife took issue with my approach, but I told her it didn’t really matter what I actually wrote in the budget.

Month after month, my idealized budget collapsed under the unexpected onslaught of real-world problems like a match-stick bridge failing under the weight of a freight train. My cars, in particular, enjoyed trashing the budget. For months they’d roll along, happily hiding the symptoms of their major automotive illnesses like crankcase rot, inflammation of the transmission or carburetor senility. They’d wait until the worst possible moment to reveal the depths of their pain and I’d find myself having to choose between keeping up the payments on my iron lung or buying four new tires.

I always went for the tires, which brought a whole new set of issues. The cars I drive aren’t new in the sense of having been manufactured within my children’s lifetimes. They’re paid for, but every time I undertake some major improvement such as buying new tires, changing the oil, or filling the tank the value of the vehicle goes up dramatically. I have my insurance agent on speed dial so I can call him up and confess that I’ve engaged in a willful act of automotive maintenance and need to significantly increase my coverage.

My wife is better at anticipating life’s little setbacks and has budgeted appropriately for them. This is a good thing because it makes our lives a little less stressful and we’re better prepared to handle what comes up. On the other hand, my relationship with money is mostly mediated through my wife now. She gives me regular cheerful updates on how the money is doing as if it’s just off at a health clinic getting stronger. I wish I got to see it more often, but I’m comforted knowing its there when I need it.

Each workday I start with a nice clean sheet of note paper which I sully with an ugly list of tasks I have to accomplish. This would be tolerable if I could just finish each item and cross it off. Except it doesn’t work that way; every task I accomplish gives rise to two more. And those give rise to two more. And so on until the list is long enough to publish in a handsome, leather-bound multi-volume set.

On second thought, maybe my life-movie would be Hercules vs. the Hydra. Or perhaps just Sisyphus.

If things don’t improve, my legacy to my children will be a lifetime of indentured servitude while they finish the tasks I never had time to get to. It’s not that I don’t try. I’ve purchased dozens of books on time management and fully intend to read them … as soon as I can find the time.

According to the experts the best thing to do is assign each task to one of four categories; urgent and important, urgent and unimportant, important, but not urgent, and unimportant and not urgent. In the real world these translate into things that will get you fired if you don’t get them done, things people get excited about even though they don’t really matter, things that you ought to do as soon as you can get around to them, and things that will be on your list until the day you die.

Another tip from the experts is to keep a log of how you spend your time and then see what you can eliminate. According to the experts, you really don’t have any clue how you actually spend most of your time.

Really.

Here’s how my typical forty hour work week broke down.

Adding items to my “to-do” list: six hours.

Reading items on my “to-do” list: two hours.

Categorizing items on my “to-do” list: five and one half hours.

Bathroom breaks: one-and-a-quarter hours.

Time spent waving my hands uselessly in front of the automatic, motion-activated faucets and paper towel dispensers: two and one third hours.

Time spent being grateful that the toilet paper dispensers aren’t motion-activated: four and three-eighths hours.

Meetings: twelve hours.

Trading e-mails to schedule meetings: Three and two-tenths hours.

Composing post-meeting follow-up e-mails: fourteen hours and twenty-one minutes.

Thinking about where to have lunch: nine hours and eight minutes.

Eating lunch: three and three-quarter hours.

Suffering indigestion from eating too fast: seven hours and thirty minutes.

Compiling data for the insanely detailed analysis of my work habits: eleven hours and thirteen seconds.

Actually completing the tasks on my “to-do” list: forty-two minutes.

Crossing things off my “to-do” list: forty-two seconds.

Feeling good about my “to-do” list: six-tenths of one second.

The experts were right, I was surprised at how I spent my week. I had no idea I wasted that much time feeling good about the “to-do” list. I also came to realize that I’d be a lot more productive if the company installed manually-operated faucets and paper towel dispensers. With the hours that would save, I’d have more time to add things to my to-do list.

The whole exercise depressed me. All of the stuff I was doing was keeping me from getting to the things on my list. Then the answer hit me. All I had to do to feel better was to change my list to reflect the things I was already doing. If I did that, I’d transform myself from always-behind guy to the King of the “to-do” list.

Except none of the stuff that I actually do counts as urgent/important. So I did what any sensible person would do and threw away the analysis. But I paused long enough to wonder what my analysis might have looked like if I had a different job.

For example, if I were a secret agent (like you see in the movies) my time log might say:

Time spent getting briefed by a cranky superior: two hours.

Traveling to exotic locations: sixteen hours.

Eating extravagant meals in expensive restaurants at taxpayer’s expense: twelve and one-tenth hours.

Wooing beautiful women: thirty-seven and one-half hours.

Exchanging veiled threats with the villain: twenty minutes.

Using cool (and highly improbable) technology: ninety-nine minutes.

Time spent making motion-sensitive bathroom fittings work: two seconds.

Time spent ripping motion-sensitive bathroom fittings off the wall: two minutes.

Defeating the villain: Eighteen very busy minutes.

Of course, a time-log for an actual secret agent would probably look a lot more like my work log with hours devoted to meetings, sending e-mail messages and filing various official documents.

When I showed my analysis to my wife she shrugged and told me about her typical week.

Laundry: Fifteen hours and seventeen minutes (including time for extra loads because her husband tends to leave clothes in places other than the hamper despite the fact that she has told him where it is repeatedly and has gone so far as to pin a red-and-white ringed target to the front.)

Remedial hamper training for husband: Two hours and sixteen minutes.

Preparing menus, shopping lists, shopping for food, and preparing meals: eight hours and forty-six minutes.

Time husband spends over tasty, home-cooked meals: fifty-one minutes.

Balancing the checkbook, paying the bills, and wondering about the fifty-two dollar charge from the video game store and the seventy-six dollar charge from the bookstore: nine hours.

Listening to husband complain about his busy week: four hours and six minutes.

Trying, unsuccessfully, to tell husband that her week was just as busy: three hours, thirty-nine minutes and twenty-two seconds.

She wanted to go on, but I interrupted and stopped her. I’d picked up on the subtle hints she’d been dropping. Like me, she felt overwhelmed by the many demands on her time and nothing I could do or say was going to make her feel any better. I just didn’t have the time.

We need job descriptions, though, because modern jobs are so complex. In the early days of humanity, the typical job description for a hunter/gatherer would have read:

1. Hunt
2. Gather

Unless, of course, the human resources cave had gotten wind of the fact that the hunter/gatherer group wasn’t following tribe policy in regards to using fully-formed, ISO 9000-compliant job descriptions. Then the manager over the hunter/gatherers would have had to get out his tablet and chisel and come up with something a little more robust.

Job Title: Hunter/Gatherer

Job Focus: Provide food for tribe members using accepted hunting and gathering techniques in a manner consistent with the standards established by industry norms.

Job Qualifications:

1. Significant experience as a member of a tribe-sustaining hunter/gatherer team, preferably in a harsh climate.
2. Proven record of accomplishment at killing medium-to-large game animals with primitive tools.
3. Advanced knowledge of hunting and gathering techniques; Masters degree preferred but not required.

Job Duties:

1. Communicate effectively with individuals at all levels of the tribe including the Chief’s cave.
2. Demonstrate effective teamwork skills with other members of the hunter/gatherer operating group to include working effectively in close quarters with stone-tipped spears and sharpened stone axes.
3. Identify, develop and evaluate hunting strategy based on knowledge of established tribe objectives, regional characteristics, and dietary needs of tribe members.
4. Coordinate and participate in the distribution of food to tribe members.
5. Additional duties as assigned.

Under this description, the poor hunter/gatherer would be so busy communicating, demonstrating, identifying and coordinating that he’d never have time to actually get food for the tribe. When he sat down with his manager — the Director of Tribal Resource Gathering and Dissemination — the conversation wouldn’t go well.

“Well Thag,” the Director of Tribal Resource Gathering and Dissemination would say, “You missed your quarterly target for the total amount of food gathered for the tribe. Can you explain that?”

Thag would think, Ugh! How could he possibly be expected to find time to hunt and gather and serve on the Tribal Color Scheme Steering Committee, Chair the Standards Compliance Team and head up the intra-cave softball tournament. Besides, didn’t upper management understand that someone with his skills and talents would be severely underutilized as a mere hunter/gatherer?

Had early humans actually used modern job descriptions, mankind would probably have starved to death centuries ago. Womankind, on the other hand, would have seen that mankind was being aggressively stupid and would have solved the problem herself. Most likely, mankind probably would have included her accomplishments in the quarterly report, but at least the tribe would have gotten fed.

Another reason the ancients didn’t need job descriptions is because they didn’t have to worry about salary and benefits. Do you think that the guys who built the pyramids had health insurance and a pension plan? A typical job description for them would probably have included phrases like “must be able to shoulder heavy loads while being whipped repeatedly,” “must be skilled at chiseling stone,” and “additional duties as required.”

The salary and benefits part would have said, “all meals provided by Pharaoh, no special diets permitted,” “living space in slave quarters provided free of charge,” and “cost of drinking water will be deducted from the employee’s salary.”

Fortunately, in these more enlightened times, salary and benefits statements tend to be along the lines of “compensation commensurate with employee qualifications,” “generous travel allowance for qualified applicants,” and “all employees are expected to contribute to the office coffee fund.”

The one thing you’re not likely to find in a modern job description is a truly honest picture of what your job will be like. Let’s say that you work as an administrative assistant. Your job description will probably be full of phrases like “create and modify documents using standard office software,” “coordinate the manager’s schedule,” “assist in implementation of company policy,” and “additional duties as required.” In truth, you’ll find yourself “writing memos for the boss when he gets too busy to do it himself,” “covering for the boss when he’s late … again,” “enforcing company rules even when they don’t make sense to you,” and “pretty much holding the company together with your bare hands.”

Job descriptions that honest are tough to come by. Which is probably why we don’t have job descriptions for family members. After all, who’d ever want to be a parent if they really understood what it involved.

Job Focus: Provide food, shelter, love and guidance for one or more young humans for a period of not less than eighteen years.

Job Qualifications:

1. Ability to look at random blobs of finger paint, crayon or other artistic media and discern that the purple blob is Daddy and the yellow blob is Mommy.
2. Ability to make appropriately sympathetic noises for every skinned knee and bruised elbow.
3. Ability to remain calm and supportive in the face of genuine injuries including bleeding head wounds and compound fractures.
4. Ability to endure school plays, concerts and recitals in which your child is clearly the only one with talent.
5. Ability to love your children enough to let them go when the job is finished.

As for salary and benefits … parenting is a job you pay to do, but the benefits speak for themselves.

I had to find a new, less math-intensive field of study. My fancy turned toward English Literature, but my father considered it an improper match. He pointed out that he had yet to see a want ad reading, “English major sought for serious leadership opportunity. Excellent benefits. Pay commensurate with experience. Non-smoker preferred. Must own boat.”

In short order I courted and abandoned several majors including accounting (the math thing again), journalism (they expected me to produce written documents on schedule and that so wasn’t me), exercise science (sweating for living also wasn’t me), business management (more math) and Political Science (which turned out to be a sneaky, dishonest name for “Pre-law”). After a while, I settled for Elementary Education.

As career preparation, Elementary Education had two things to recommend it. First, the courses were kind of fun because I got to spend a lot of time creating cool things for my hypothetical future classroom. Second, the female-to-male ratio among El Ed students was the mathematical inverse of that same ratio in Computer Engineering. And it turns out that the kind of idealistic young women who are attracted to careers in education are also attracted idealistic young men who profess to be attracted to careers in education.

Looking back, I could have used some career counseling. I committed to education readily enough and, for the first few years, I even worked as a teacher. My heart wasn’t in it and eventually I left teaching for management. To be honest with myself, I hadn’t been completely honest with myself in college. My infatuation was a hormonal imbalance that didn’t stand the test of time.

What I didn’t realize was that when choosing a career it’s important to think in the long term. Sure that Business Metrics class might have a good looking syllabus now, but how are you going to feel when you’re forty-five years old and it’s eleven at night and you still have to analyze the performance indicators for the West Coast Promotions Department? You’ll wish you’d chosen a more sympathetic career, one that really loved you back, one that didn’t drain the life out of you; something like “millionaire playboy”.

Of course there aren’t that many openings for that kind of position and thy all go to guys who are already millionaires. So, what you need to do in college, is take stock of yourself, your interests and abilities and match them to a suitable field of gainful employment.

For example, if you enjoy the outdoor life, like to take risks and have a low tolerance for stuffy classroom education, you might succeed as Whitewater Rafting Guide, Lumberjack, or Flagman on a highway construction project. Perhaps you hear the call of the sea and yearn for the freedom of your own command. Consider being an Alaskan Crab Fisherman, deck officer on an Oil Tanker or shift manager at Cap’n Billy’s Chowder House and Bait Shop. If your heart’s desire is to work in the exciting world of high finance … well, best to forget that one. Nobody’s hiring right now.

If selecting a career field is the equivalent of identifying a potential mate, then applying for a job is like asking for a first date. You have to start by doing everything possible to make yourself attractive. In the dating world this can include make-up, fitness training, or (in extreme cases) plastic surgery. When job-hunting it’s mostly a matter of getting the right credentials by way of training, education or (in extreme cases) stealing a diploma off some other person’s office wall.

The actual job interview is a lot like the date except that you mostly likely won’t get dinner and you definitely can’t expect a kiss afterwards. If you are chosen, the company proposes to you. Just like a marriage proposal, if you accept you’ll wind up with a new title and boatload of unexpected responsibilities. Which seems okay during that blissful honeymoon period just after you start a new job.

Sooner or later that will end; probably with an argument of some kind. In a marriage the argument will be over something trivial like the division of labor, whether or not you refilled the coffee maker or where the budget went. In a job it will be about something vital like your assigned responsibilities, whether or not you refilled the copier toner, and where the budget went.

You’ll weather that storm and you and your job will settle down somewhere; maybe in a cozy little branch office. Before long you’ll have a deliverable or two to call your own. You might even have a chance to adopt a new paradigm. As your personal brand grows and you gain a greater market share in the thought space of your organization, you and your job will move to bigger and better real estate. There will come a day when you’re comfortably ensconced in a position that matches your talents and you and your job can look forward to aging gracefully together.

After a decade or two you might even begin to take your job for granted; after all you’ve been together forever. Just be sure to stay focused on your current job and don’t let your thoughts stray to the job you could have had, that cute little job that still haunts your dreams from time to time. Sure you could give up your current job and go back to that other one, but then you’d just have to start over and, frankly, that sounds too much like work.

Somewhere along the line, most of us trade our shiny dreams for lackluster respectability, a decent dental plan, and a few bucks in our pocket at the end of the month. Employment holds all the appeal and excitement of a bicycle with two flat tires and a missing seat; you can’t get anywhere fast and the ride is pretty uncomfortable.

The truth is, work is what you make of it. With a little mental effort, you can trick yourself into having a good time each and every day. Imagine your office as the most interesting, amazing place on Earth. That’s right — pretend you really do work for the circus.

It’s not that hard if you put your mind to it.

After all, your boss probably dresses in a spiffy suit, enjoys barking out orders, and likes to crack the whip over you. Isn’t that what a Ringmaster does? And if your boss can be the Ringmaster, surely your coworkers all have a role as well.

Think about your sales team. They’re out there day after day, making noise, drawing attention to themselves, and putting on a good show for the paying customers. Every time your company launches a new product there’s probably a HUGE public event. People are invited in from all over the country and the sales team falls all over themselves. Every member of the team tries to upstage the others. Eventually they trip over each other and wind up looking foolish.

Clowns are exactly like that, except they tend to have more credibility than the average corporate salesperson and never make promises that the rest of the circus can’t deliver.

A disappointed customer can be dangerous; they’ll growl their frustration to their friends who will become annoyed-by-proxy and before long you’ll have a serious problem. The only way to deal with an unhappy customer is to pick someone from the office (preferably someone expendable) and send them out to engage with the customer. (Aside: Engage is a business school word for “talk to and possibly be damaged by”.) If the person you send is good, they’ll sooth the customer and quiet the situation. If they’re not good, they’ll be eaten alive and you’ll have to find the next-most-expendable person to send in after them.

Lion tamers work under exactly the same conditions, but they get to carry a gun. Lion tamers also receive more applause. To be fair, though, corporate lion tamers rarely have to feed their clients raw meat. It all sort of balances out in the end.

Circuses sometimes feature strange acts like the Human Cannonball. This guy struts around the center ring in a shiny outfit, hands held high begging for applause before he’s even done anything. After a lot of build-up, he’ll eventually get to his actual performance which involves a less-than-exciting bang, some smoke, and a trip that is shorter than the average sneeze. Other than waving his arms, he doesn’t actually do anything. If he wasn’t wearing a tinfoil flight suit in a circus, he’d be wearing a pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit in a Business Consulting Firm.

Juggling is as common in the corporate world as under the big top. Keeping projects, clients, deadlines, budgets, and appointments moving along in an orderly fashion is an art that many people try and few master. When a juggler fumbles, a few balls, clubs, or (on occasion) knives clatter to the ground. In the office the debris includes contracts, payments and (on occasion) careers.

The people responsible for keeping on eye of the bottom line tend to work at the top of the company. In the accounting office they pay close attention to the account balances and make sure that nothing gets dropped accidentally. When it comes to being careful, tightrope walkers have nothing on the company accountants.

A circus just wouldn’t be a circus without monkeys. No matter how down you feel about your own life, you can’t help but laugh when a troop of primates tumbles into the ring and starts cavorting about. At times, the little critters seem almost human and you catch yourself expect to hear them say something intelligent.

Most seasoned corporate types feel the same way about the annual influx of college interns; dressed up in their brand new button-down shirts and faux-silk ties they convincingly impersonate real employees. It would be a mistake to try to pay them in bananas, though.

Once you realize that you really do work for a circus, you’ll seem similarities everywhere you turn. That enormous glass-and-steel structure on the corner of Main Street and Commerce Avenue may as well be a giant red-and-white striped tent. Every morning there’s a parade through the front doors as people trudge in under the watchful eyes of the CEO for another day of whatever-it-is-your-company-does. You might not have three rings on the ground, but I’d bet there are at least a dozen things going on at once all the time.

There are a few differences, though.

At work your only audience is probably your coworkers and they aren’t that impressed with what you’re doing because they could do it themselves if they just weren’t so busy with their own work. You never get to see the really weird acts like sword swallowers or snake charmers and the cafeteria doesn’t serve corn dogs, cotton candy or snow cones. On the bright side, though, you probably also don’t ever have to sweep up after the elephants.