During my earlier work life, I had to dig deeper for that sense of meaning and purpose to my actions which are needed to sustain one's life beyond the bare bones of survival. Given these preconditions based upon my experiences, the most meaningful work for me tended to be cyclical in nature, communal and united around a common goal, flexible in how you got the job done, and with tangible results. Work that is cyclical reflects a range of activities for different times of the year, seasons, or even months. These patterns of effort establish an analog existence that has a radically different mode of being than more repetitive and fractured types of work. Cyclical work grounds your activities in the circadian flow of the measures of days, months, and years and therefore helps ground us in cyclical relations to time and our environment.
Cycles also affect our health, particularly our hunger, reproduction, and sleep patterns.
Communal work united around a shared goal establishes a common project. This project may be social, political, or based upon other criteria around a shared belief. If we were able to rally around contemporary problems such as homelessness with the spirit of a sustained barn-raising, then we might see some change despite the overwhelming scope of this and other problems. We have eroded our sense of community since World War II, which provided perhaps the greatest example of unified work in human history - albeit for the necessary labor within a grisly business. Work that describes the problem rather than prescribes the solution engages workers in the creative process of production.