The gap between knowing what would make your career more meaningful and actually creating that meaningfulness is where most good intentions die. You read the right books, consume insightful content, maybe even work with a coach to clarify your values and purpose. You develop genuine insight into what’s missing from your current work and what you’d need to feel more fulfilled.
And then… nothing changes.
This gap between insight and action is what Jess Annison’s Smart Careers is specifically designed to bridge. Throughout the book, she emphasizes that career crafting isn’t a purely intellectual exercise. It’s not about achieving perfect clarity and then making one decisive move. It’s a practice—an ongoing, iterative process of reflection and action that compounds over time.
As she writes: “Career crafting is intentional. It’s not a half-hearted endeavour. It’s not flinging some mud at a wall to see whether any of it sticks, it’s about really thinking through what you want and then working to make it happen.”
The question isn’t whether you should pursue more meaningful work. The question is: what specific actions will you take this week to start moving in that direction?
The Six-Step Framework: Not Linear But Iterative
Annison’s career crafting methodology consists of six elements: heed the wake-up call, shape your purpose, tweak your current role, explore and experiment with bigger shifts, savour and share meaningfulness, and navigate the dark sides.
What’s crucial to understand is that these aren’t necessarily sequential steps you complete once and then move past. They’re more like different dimensions of an ongoing practice. You might be simultaneously shaping your purpose while also tweaking your current role. You might need to revisit your purpose as you learn from experiments. You’ll continually need to savour meaningfulness and navigate dark sides, regardless of which other elements you’re working on.
This non-linear quality can feel messy, particularly if you prefer clear roadmaps with definitive endpoints. But it reflects the reality of how meaningful careers actually develop. As Annison notes, “Career crafting is a dynamic activity. Meaningfulness changes over time, as do our personal circumstances and the wider world of work. These are habits for life, not a once-and-done endeavour.”
Starting Where You Are: The Power of Beginning
One of the most paralyzing aspects of pursuing meaningful work is the feeling that you need to have everything figured out before you start. You need to know your exact purpose, your ideal role, your perfect career path—and only then can you begin taking action.
But Annison’s framework inverts this logic. You start by taking action based on your current, imperfect understanding. That action generates new information and insights, which refines your understanding, which informs your next actions. The clarity emerges through the process, not before it.
This is why she emphasizes beginning with exercises and experiments rather than prolonged contemplation. Complete a Meaningful Work Graph to identify when you’ve felt most and least fulfilled in past roles and why. Create a Meaning Wheel to assess how your current role measures up on the five components of meaningful work. Identify your core values and notice where they’re being honored or violated.
These exercises aren’t meant to produce perfect answers. They’re meant to produce enough insight to inform your next small step. Maybe that step is a single conversation with someone in a field you’re curious about. Maybe it’s spending 15 minutes reframing how you think about a frustrating aspect of your current role. Maybe it’s volunteering to shadow a colleague for half a day.
The specifics matter less than the pattern: reflect, act, learn, refine, repeat. This iterative cycle is how meaningful careers get built in practice.
The Critical Importance of Your Support Crew
Throughout Smart Careers, one theme appears repeatedly: you can’t do this alone. Not because you’re incapable, but because career crafting benefits enormously from outside perspective, accountability, and support.
Annison recommends building what she calls a “career crafting crew”—a small group of people who can support your journey in different ways. This might include:
Your partner or close friends who know you deeply and can help you process what you’re thinking and feeling. They provide moral support and help you see patterns you might miss.
Current or former colleagues who understand your work context and can help you identify opportunities for job crafting or connect you with people in fields you’re exploring.
A mentor who has navigated similar transitions and can share wisdom from their experience.
A coach who creates space for you to think deeply, asks powerful questions, and helps you stay accountable to your commitments.
The specific composition of your crew matters less than having people who can play these different roles. What you definitely need is at least one person who will ask you regularly: “You said you were going to do X by this date. How’s that going?”
Without accountability, good intentions evaporate under the pressure of daily demands. Your job keeps requiring your attention. Family responsibilities don’t pause while you figure out your career. The urgent crowds out the important. Having someone who will check in on your progress—not judgmentally, but genuinely interested in how you’re doing—dramatically increases the likelihood you’ll follow through.
Making Time for Career Crafting: The Non-Negotiable Commitment
One of the most common obstacles people face is finding time for career crafting activities. Life is already full. Work is demanding. Family needs attention. Where exactly are you supposed to find hours for reflection exercises, conversations, and experiments?
Annison’s answer is both simple and challenging: you make time the same way you make time for anything genuinely important. You schedule it.
She specifically recommends blocking out “crafting time” in your calendar—actual appointments with yourself to complete exercises, conduct conversations, or work on experiments. These appointments should be labeled clearly enough that they feel non-negotiable. Not “think about career stuff” but “complete Purpose Canvas exercise” or “informational interview with Sarah about consulting.”
This might sound obvious, but there’s a subtle psychological shift involved. When career crafting is a vague intention floating in the back of your mind, it’s easy to perpetually postpone. “I’ll think about that this weekend” becomes next weekend, becomes next month, becomes never. But when you have a specific 90-minute block in your calendar on Thursday at 7 PM to work on your Meaningful Work Graph, that’s much harder to ignore.
The specific amount of time required varies depending on where you are in the process. Early stages involving reflection and exercises might require several focused sessions over a few weeks. The experimentation phase could extend over months. But even small investments—one hour per week consistently applied—compound into significant progress over time.
The Role of Small Shifts and Job Crafting
One of the most valuable insights from Smart Careers is that meaningful career changes don’t always require dramatic reinvention. Sometimes small shifts—what Annison calls job crafting—can create disproportionate increases in fulfillment.
This is particularly important because the perceived stakes of “changing careers” can be paralyzing. It feels like you’re either committing fully to your current path or burning everything down and starting over. The middle ground gets overlooked.
But research on job crafting shows that intentional adjustments to your tasks, relationships, and how you think about your work can significantly boost meaningfulness without requiring you to leave your role or organization. Maybe you can’t fundamentally change what you do, but you might be able to:
Spend more time on the aspects of your role you find most rewarding and less on the aspects you find draining (task crafting)
Build stronger connections with colleagues or customers who energize you, or collaborate more with people whose work you find inspiring (relationship crafting)
Reframe how you think about your work’s purpose in a way that connects more deeply to your values (purpose crafting)
The book shares the example of someone who shifted from thinking about their communications work as “putting lipstick on pigs” to “helping the organization share what it’s up to and why, making complex things simpler.” Nothing about their actual job changed, but the cognitive reframe made the work feel more worthwhile.
These small shifts serve two functions. First, they might provide sufficient fulfillment that more dramatic changes become unnecessary. Second, even if you ultimately decide to pursue a bigger change, the job crafting process helps you identify what specifically needs to be different—which makes your eventual transition more likely to succeed.
The Experimentation Phase: Gathering Real Data
When job crafting isn’t sufficient, the next phase involves exploring potential alternatives through hands-on experiments. This is where many people get stuck, because running experiments requires you to act despite uncertainty.
Annison emphasizes that experiments should be designed to test specific hypotheses, not just provide vague exposure to a field. Before you shadow someone or take a short course, clarify: What am I trying to learn? What do I expect to discover? What would make this experiment successful?
After each experiment, conduct a structured debrief. What did you learn about the potential path? What did you learn about yourself? How did the experience align or conflict with your purpose? What are your next steps based on this information?
This systematic approach prevents experiments from becoming merely interesting experiences that don’t actually inform your decision-making. Each experiment should move you closer to clarity about what you want to pursue or rule out.
The book tracks Jenny’s experimentation process as she tests different possibilities: conversations with freelancers, shadowing a customer success director, taking a UX design course. Each experiment yields specific insights. Some options get ruled out. Others get refined. Gradually, a clear direction emerges—not from a sudden revelation, but from accumulated data about what works and what doesn’t.
Savoring and Sharing: Sustaining Meaningfulness Over Time
Even after you’ve successfully crafted more meaning into your work—whether through job crafting, career change, or some combination—the work isn’t done. Meaningfulness requires ongoing attention and cultivation.
This is where the savoring and sharing practices become essential. Annison recommends regular reflection on what feels meaningful in your work and why. This might be a weekly practice where you identify two or three moments from the past week that felt particularly rewarding. Or a monthly check-in where you assess how you’re experiencing the five components of meaningful work.
The point isn’t to produce perfect insights. It’s to build a habit of noticing and appreciating meaningfulness when it’s present, which amplifies its positive effects and helps you recognize when it starts to decline.
Sharing your experiences with others serves a similar function. Talking about what you find fulfilling—with colleagues, friends, or family—helps you process and deepen those experiences. It might inspire others to think differently about their own work. And it can create opportunities for collaboration or connection around shared sources of meaning.
As one person in the book describes: “I’ve been much more open about talking about what feels rewarding for me at work. It’s led to some great conversations with my team… It really helped us understand each other a bit more and that helps us work together better too.”
Navigating Setbacks and the Dark Sides
Building a meaningful career isn’t a smooth upward trajectory. There will be setbacks, disappointments, and periods where meaningfulness dips despite your best efforts.
Maybe an experiment reveals that a path you were excited about isn’t actually a good fit. Maybe job crafting improvements get undermined by organizational changes. Maybe the meaningful work you’ve created starts triggering some of the dark sides—stress, overwork, boundary issues—that need active management.
Annison’s framework acknowledges these challenges and provides tools for navigating them. The Dark Side Diary helps you track when caring about your work is creating problems that need addressing. Regular reflection practices help you notice when satisfaction is declining before it becomes a crisis. The iterative nature of career crafting means you can make adjustments rather than feeling like everything is broken if one thing isn’t working.
Perhaps most importantly, maintaining sources of meaning outside of work—relationships, hobbies, community involvement, spirituality—provides both perspective and resilience. When work is your only source of fulfillment, any work difficulty threatens your entire sense of meaning. When you have a rich life beyond work, you have the ballast to weather work challenges without losing your bearings entirely.
The Long Game: Career Crafting as Lifelong Practice
The final shift Annison advocates for is viewing career crafting not as a project with an endpoint but as a lifelong practice. You’re never “done” crafting your career, just as you’re never “done” maintaining your health or nurturing your relationships.
This might sound exhausting—one more thing to maintain forever—but in practice it’s liberating. It means you don’t have to make perfect decisions, because you can always adjust. It means setbacks aren’t catastrophes, they’re just information that informs your next iteration. It means the skills you develop through the process—self-awareness, experimentation, job crafting, purpose clarification—compound in value over time.
As circumstances change—your interests evolve, your organization restructures, new opportunities emerge, life events shift your priorities—you already have the practice and tools to adapt. You’re not starting from scratch each time. You’re applying familiar capabilities to new situations.
This is what makes career crafting genuinely “smart.” It’s not about finding the perfect job once and then coasting. It’s about developing the capacity to continuously shape your work toward meaningfulness, whatever that means for you in this particular phase of your life and career.
Your Next Move
If you’ve read this far, you’re likely experiencing some version of the “is this it?” question in your own career. You have enough self-awareness to recognize that something could be better, even if you’re not sure exactly what that something is.
The path forward isn’t to keep thinking about it until you achieve perfect clarity. The path forward is to take one small, concrete action based on your current imperfect understanding.
That might be completing one of the exercises from the book. It might be reaching out to someone for a 30-minute conversation about their career path. It might be identifying one small job crafting tweak you could implement this week.
The specifics matter less than breaking the inertia. As Annison writes: “Your most fulfilling years of work might still lie ahead—but only if you’re willing to craft them intentionally rather than letting them happen by default.”
What’s one thing you could do this week to move slightly closer to more meaningful work?
That’s where you start.