If you were making a movie and you wanted to quickly convey to the audience that the main character is a talented chef, you'd probably show them cutting an onion.

There's something about the way that a chef cuts a vegetable - that distinctive, claw-like grip and the relentless, precise cuts - that is completely compelling to the average home cook. It's like a magic trick, something that marks them out as another breed and is even liable to generate unprompted 'oohs' from non-chef observers.

But if we stop and think about it, we all know there's nothing magical about knife skills. It's simply the result of hundreds or thousands of hours of practice at a single task. More specifically, it's the kind of practice you most often get when something is a routine part of your 40ish hour work week.

Over the past few years, I've come to think that we all have our own version of knife skills: some task we're repeating over and over, some skillset we're cultivating, or some approach that we're refining.

What I'm much less sure about, though, is whether we're always aware of which skill it is that we're actually developing.

A cut above

Think of it this way: if you were a motivated adult trying to learn a new skill (say a musical instrument or a foreign language) outside of work, I suspect you'd manage to find five hours a week to practice. Perhaps a bit more if you're really enthusiastic. Perhaps much less if you're anything like me.

Meanwhile, if you're working full-time, you're spending 35-40 hours getting better at something. For the purposes of this article I'm going to call these these your knife skills - the things that become increasingly effortless to you but would be deeply challenging to the uninitiated. They may not look as impressive or dramatic as an actual chef's knife skills, but they're the muscle that you're exercising every time you go to work.

Not only does full-time employment force you to bank quite a lot of hours honing a skillset, it also demands you utilise those skills consistently. Your piano practice might well fall by the wayside when life gets busy. Your Duolingo streak may come to an abrupt halt when you're hit by personal hardship. But your work insists that you turn up week after week after week.

In other words, your working life is the single best chance you have to achieve anything approaching mastery of a skillset. Whether or not you believe Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours theory of mastery, there's simply no arguing with the fact that we spend a heckuva lot of time at work.

Slice of life

Crucially, our knife skills are not always what we think they are. You might assume, if you're an editor, that editing copy is your knife skill - the muscle group you're pushing to grow stronger and stronger through constant reps.

But in my experience, it's quite common for editors to actually spend a bulk of their time arguing with publishers, running 1-to-1s with writers, calling PRs, or commissioning freelancers.

There's nothing wrong with this, necessarily, but it does point to the fact that we're not always super aware of how we're actually spending our time.

The bigger issue, in my experience, is when you start to spend a lot of time building a skillset you don't particularly want. In one job, I came to realise that the knife skills I was gaining were mostly how to argue effectively with senior stakeholders, how to navigate a fearful workplace culture, and how to handle explosive colleagues.

There's probably a CV-friendly way I could describe those skills, but fundamentally they're skills that I just didn’t want to cultivate. If I'm going to ever attain mastery of anything, I don't think I want it to be a remarkable talent for talking to workplace bullies.

All of which is to say that the new year is as good a time as any to look at how you're actually spending your working week and reflect on which skills - simply by virtue of time and repetition - you're actually building. And then ask yourself: are these the knife skills I want?