नियतं कुरु कर्म त्वं कर्म ज्यायो ह्यकर्मणः।शरीरयात्रापि च ते न प्रसिद्ध्येदकर्मणः॥
niyataṃ kuru karma tvaṃ karma jyāyo hyakarmaṇaḥśarīra-yātrāpi ca te na prasiddhyed akarmaṇaḥ
Word by word
The verse says
Do the work that is yours to do. Working is better than not working. You could not even keep your body going if you did nothing.
In plain words
A plain instruction, and then a very ordinary argument for it.
Do your work. It beats not doing it. And then the practical point: you would not survive a week.
After several verses of philosophy, Krishna reaches for the body. Eating is work. Staying alive is work.
Where you've felt this · with money
A week into doing nothing at all, the flat is unmanageable, the food has run out, and the person has not become peaceful. They have become someone with a list.
Going deeper
Niyataṁ karma — the work that is fixed for you, allotted, regular. It is the first hint of what 3.35 will call sva-dharma, and the same honest problem attaches to it.
In its own setting, allotted meant in large part the duties of the social order you were born into. That reading is in the text and it has been used to tell people to stay where they were put. It should be named rather than smoothed over.
What survives without that frame is narrower and still useful: some work is actually in front of you, and other work is not. The dishes, the child, the thing you agreed to. Niyata at minimum means this one, not a hypothetical better one.
The body argument is doing something specific too. Krishna has just spent Chapter 2 on what does not die. A reader could take that as a reason to disregard the body entirely. This verse pulls back hard: whatever you are, you are currently something that has to eat.
The Gita keeps doing this. Every flight upward is followed by a sentence that puts you back on the floor.