Work has negative utility. It's something that you spend, actually the irreplaceable time of your life.

Increased efficiency means more money (or joy, or other things with positive utility), or less work :)

Iff you consider your work a net-negative or just a means to an end. There's certainly a case to be made for optimizing for work that is an end in itself where more work may increases positive utility in some areas (joy, fulfillment, whatever) and possibly decreasing it in others (money, status, whatever).

I hope work isn't a net-netagive, but there are always things that must be done that you don't want to do. Sometimes you can hire someone else, but often you cannot.

I was probably too sloppy in my wording. I interpreted the OP to mean work may have negative utility for the individual person, but not in the aggregate. I don't know that the idea that work is essential individual sacrifice for some end goal is particularly healthy.

I would hope for your own health you clean your dishes after you eat. There are a number of distasteful jobs that have to be done.

I understand where you're coming from, but I think it's built on assumptions that I'm saying don't necessarily need to be true. Namely, that cleaning your dishes is "distasteful" which tracks with the originally assertion that you do some jobs just to get them done to get to what you really want. I.e., they are just a means to an end.

My claim is this can be unhealthy because you're not really living in the present and constantly stuck in the mindset of "once this distasteful thing is done, then I can get to the stuff that makes me happy." Or to steal from The Good Place, "Humans only live for 80 years and they spend so much of it waiting for things to be over."

My idea is that "work", or maybe more precisely, a "job", is something that you only do because you have to, because you need something it gives in exchange, and otherwise won't do.

If you do something because you enjoy it, it's a "hobby". If you are paid for that, too, you are just lucky to have the best of both worlds :)

I agree that's a goal, but I think it's overly concerned with the product (job) rather than the process (how the job is done). I think focusing on the latter is more sustainable for enjoying something because the job itself will undoubtedly get stale at some point and can lead to the hedonic treadmill of constantly looking to the next thing to make you happy. I've known people who have had jobs that people would traditionally consider unenjoyable, but they had the mindsets to truly enjoy the work by focusing on the process, constantly bettering their performance, etc.