Even if you absolutely love your job and can’t wait to get to it every morning, there must be parts of it that are just tedious. Just like death and taxes, the only other thing that is certain is that after you do the same thing over and over again, no matter how much you love it, it will eventually start to get boring. It’s the same with food, you may love steak, but I forced you to eat steak for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you would be begging me for some chicken after a week.
So how do you break up the monotony of a job that you’ve done for a while. Well you’re in luck, I have a number of ideas that might just help. Remember, these are just suggestions, and even if none of these work for you, at least it’ll get you thinking about what excites you.
- Vary Your Tasks – If your work day is anything like mine, most of your day is made up of a number of tasks you need to get done by a certain deadline. Of course it is important to prioritize your work based on when it is due, but amongst that, I recommend also varying the tasks you’re doing. Shuffle some emails in between a more fun creative writing session, and then maybe do some hours tracking, and then a brainstorming activity, followed up some more administrative work. By varying your activities, you are allowing your brain to take a breather from any one given thing so that you don’t spend too much time spinning on one item and burn yourself out.
- Vary You Location – You’d be surprised how much good a change of scenery can do for your work. Working out of coffee shops has become pretty standard operating procedure for the digital nomad, but you don’t have to limit yourself just to coffee shops. You could grab yourself a WiFi hotspot like the one sold here and work completely off the grid. While you’re phone can double as a hotspot, this one will allow you to get internet anywhere you go and connect multiple devices. You could bring your whole office if you wanted to!
- Create Focus Bubbles – Rather than attacking the day head on and forcing yourself to focus from 9 AM through 5 PM, break your day up into hour long or half hour long focus bubbles. There are a number of apps in the app store that are designed to keep track of these for you, and even make it fun by giving you little animated trees that grow while you’re focused. By giving yourself a designated time to goof off and blow off some steam while also creating hyper focus bubbles, you are essentially taking the day one baby step at a time. You will find yourself to be really productive for your on/focus times, and then your goof off times will feel more earned!
There are many ways to break up the constant work that you have coming your way, but the most important thing is not to follow my ideas, but start thinking in this way, and discover what works for you. Each person is different after all, and finding your work discipline will help you find much more happiness and fulfillment in your work, because you’ll have fun doing it!