नियतं सङ्गरहितमरागद्वेषतः कृतम्।अफलप्रेप्सुना कर्म यत्तत्सात्त्विकमुच्यते॥
niyataṃ saṅga-rahitam arāga-dveṣataḥ kṛtamaphala-prepsunā karma yat tat sāttvikam ucyate
Word by word
The verse says
Work that is in order, done without clinging, without liking or disliking, by someone not reaching for the fruit: that work is called clear.
In plain words
Now action itself, in three kinds. This is the first.
Four conditions, and the third is easy to miss. Without liking or disliking. The work is done neither because you fancy it nor against your will.
That is a strange standard until you notice how much of what you do falls into one of those two columns.
Where you've felt this · at work
A postman delivers to the same hundred houses. There is a house with a dog he does not enjoy and a house with a woman who always says something kind. He arrives at both at the same speed and neither of them gets a different service. He is not suppressing a preference. After eleven years he does not really have one.
Going deeper
Working without liking or disliking the work is the condition most people assume is impossible, and it is better understood as a result than as an effort.
The verse is not describing someone grimly overriding his preferences. That is suppression, and it is exhausting and visible. It describes someone in whom the preference has quietened down, which is what happens to most preferences when they stop being fed.
The order matters. You do not achieve this by deciding to have no feelings about your tasks. It arrives as a side effect of having let go of the fruit for long enough, because most of our liking and disliking of tasks is really about what they are expected to yield.
So the practical instruction is not to flatten yourself. It is to notice that a job you dread and a job you look forward to are often the same job with two different stories about the result attached.