Introducing Good Work, a Newsletter by Holloway

This week, we’ll be publishing our first newsletter: Good Work. We’ll send it weekly on Sunday evenings and you can subscribe to it here.

🎶 This week’s theme song: Something More Than Free by Jason Isbell

The job is not the work.Seth Godin*

What is work?

Effort, slog, passion, purpose, something undertaken. Fight, force, and change.

Work is music, food, war, television, anything you can think of. Everything we enjoy or endure, what allows us to thrive or oppresses our ability to make choices, is created or accomplished by work. Work encompasses more than the rules you follow at the job you go to every day. Work is the whole damn world.

What makes work good? Is good work what we work on? Something that makes us useful? To whom? To what purpose? At what scale? Is good workhow we work? With intention, with tools, with each other?

Good Work is a newsletter devoted to exploring how we — individually, as communities and societies, and worldwide — spend and lose and use our time at work. If you get a job at age twenty-two and keep at it till you’re sixty-five, you’ll spend upwards of 90,000 hours of your life at work. We don’t need more business page analyses. We have plenty of Tweets and #hottakes. But do we talk enough about what work means to each of us, in a practical and personal way? We need to dig deep into what work is, what it does, what it means, and what it all amounts to.

The Good Work newsletter will divide wide-ranging research and discussion on the world of modern work into three categories: tools, people, and ideas. Good Work will cover news and points of interest around all of these topics, and spark discussions about where they overlap. We won’t guarantee answers, but we will guarantee a spirited dialogue about the nature of modern work.

Much of our work at Holloway is in book-length Guides to navigating complex topics key to modern work. Because of their length and depth, those come out a few times a year. The Good Work newsletter will be there every week, delivered on Sunday evenings, to keep you versed in what’s happening in the world, in our heads and readings and conversations, anything and everything to do with modern work. Here’s some of what you can expect:

• Viewpoints on the evolving nature of work, like Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s blog posts about remote work and how “work doesn’t have to be crazy.”
• Dialogues on the role of business in society, including sharing overlooked pieces about why we work, how we trade, and economic systems, like Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.
• Broadly applicable frameworks and mental models, like Kevin Kelly’s generatives from Better Than Free.
• Building on discussion related to current events affecting or affected by modern work. If a report comes out on the negative repercussions of the open office plan, we’ll share the report and break it down.
• Practical analyses of the latest tools and software that support your work, like the best task management tools, or the pros and cons of platforms like Airtable, Notion, Paper, and Quip.

We want the Good Work newsletter to create a vibrant community of readers and contributors. As we grow our readership, we’d love to hear what you think would be useful for us to write about. You can submit interesting links, perspectives, questions you want answered, things you’d love to write about, and anything else at goodwork@holloway.com.

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes — everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!Audre Lorde