I read an interesting book (somewhere in my library if you're interested) that took a different view on work ; one of the preliminary discussions was about the famed ethymology of the word "travail". The author made it go back to the immobilization of a horse in a cage when changing its horseshoes, or the immobilization of a woman in her "travail" of giving birth. It's the fact that we are taken by a task, preventing us to do anything else on a whim. In that much more neutral sense, you can view work as anything you choose to be busy with.