Most complaints I hear from people who are unsatisfied with their jobs fall into one of two categories.  One person has so much work to do that they are completely overwhelmed and working 70-hour weeks. The other is so bored with the monotony of their job that they can barely keep their eyes open.  I’ve been hearing the latter a lot more recently, so I’m going to focus on it today.

The concept of “flow” is very popular among personal development gurus right now.  The idea is that when you are working on something challenging and interesting that is right at the limit of your ability, three hours can zip by and feel like ten minutes.  Most of you have probably experienced this state at some point.  It might have been while working on a project you were passionate about in college, reading a great book, or possibly even while completing a challenging assignment at work.

Anti-Flow

However, Many corporate workers experience the exact opposite of “flow” every day at work.  None of their tasks are interesting, and they aren’t challenged intellectually. When they glance at the clock, they find that only seven minutes have passed, when they thought it must have been an hour.

During these times, the most obscure and random topics that would never cross your mind under normal circumstances can become the most fascinating things in the world.  During my own periods of extreme corporate boredom or anti-flow, I have found the following subjects unbelievably captivating:

• Writing a stand-up comedy routine featuring only accounting-related puns
• Trading manual labor for passage on a transatlantic cargo ship
• The coffee-bean roasting process
• Day trading stocks of self storage unit companies
• Elon Musk
• Using a time machine to convince classic rock groups to cover songs from other classic rock groups (c’mon, you want to hear Zeppelin’s cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”)
• Board game strategies
• Marmots
• Kevin Hart movies

Some of these things are interesting in their own right, but most are not.  They are merely the product of a mind seeking novelty when faced with an endless stream of mundane tasks.

Incentives in a corporate environment can unintentionally lead to poor results and bored workers. An employee with an easy assignment due in three days has very little motivation to buckle down and complete the work now.  This is intrinsic human behavior, widely known as Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion, regardless of difficulty).  

It’s also worth noting that people can be both busy and bored.  Just because someone has a lot of work to do does not mean they are engaged with their job.  Working 50 hours per week on drudgery that requires little independent thinking or creativity is almost as bad as not having enough to do.  Careless mistakes often become more frequent in these scenarios.

Fight for Your Right

In dealing with my own seasons of anti-flow over my career, I’ve discovered that the following things hold true:

• Boring & repetitive work is still better than not enough work
• High performance on mundane tasks leads to better assignments
• Showing initiative can take you to another level

Nothing is worse than sitting in a cubicle watching minutes crawl by while wondering if this is really how you are going to spend the next 30+ years of your life.  Even the most monotonous tasks are generally preferable to this.  The toughest part of this situation is fighting against inertia.  

Many folks will be hesitant to try to take on more work if they accustomed to downtime during their day or week, even if the downtime is making them miserable.  If you can overcome this tendency and just start on new tasks, it will be much easier to keep going. This way, days will go by much quicker.

Another benefit to increasing and improving your output on day-to-day tasks is that it will likely lead to more interesting work in the future.  I discussed this in more detail in an earlier article, but the main idea is that you need to prove yourself capable on small and unimportant tasks before you are assigned more meaningful work.

Finally, if you are unsatisfied with your current situation or level of assignments, it may be time to take some action on your own behalf to showcase your abilities.  This can be done by proposing a solution to an ongoing problem, or coming up with a plan to improve how your group or company functions.

If there is a recurring problem in your department, figure out the cause and develop a potential solution.  Then present your work to your boss.  You could say something like this: “I’ve noticed our group has a problem with XYZ that keeps happening every month.  I’ve come up with a system to prevent that mistake in the future.  Can you review my proposal and tell me what you think?”

If you’ve come up with an effective idea, a manager will often happily let you implement it.  However, it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme whether or not your idea is ultimately adopted.  The fact that you were concerned with the big picture and not just your own personal responsibilities and that you took the initiative to come up with a solution on your own is often enough to impress your superiors (caveat – the solutions you propose must be logical and well thought out, even if not ultimately adopted.  You can’t expect to impress the boss by presenting poor and uninformed ideas).

Losing the Best and Brightest

I recently spoke with a long-time friend who was unsatisfied with her career.  She was a finance analyst with two degrees who rose quickly in any organization she joined.  I can honestly say she has one of the sharpest accounting/finance minds of anyone I know.

I asked her about her job, and without thinking, she blurted out “my job is too easy and I’m bored stiff!  Nobody will give me anything real to do!”

Pursuing this further, I found out she had enrolled in physics courses from the local university in her free time, mostly for fun.  However, she really enjoyed the classes and earned “A’s.” After two part-time semesters, she dropped the finance career and returned to school to study engineering.

For my friend, it is unfortunate that she spent so much time preparing for and working in an unfulfilling career.  However, she is now working on something that is very motivating and rewarding.  Her former company, however, just lost one of their most talented young employees because they weren’t giving her enough interesting work to do.

This is the other side of employee boredom that is not discussed as often – the cost to the employer.

Engaged Employees Stick Around

Contrary to popular belief in most companies, many of the best employees either lose motivation or leave the firm not because they have too much work to do, but rather because they aren’t given enough work to do, and the assignments they do get are in no way challenging or stimulating enough.

This is something you should consider if you are in a supervisory position of any kind.  To maintain a motivated team and limit turnover, you must assign your best employees interesting and challenging work.

To keep your top employees engaged, you need to extricate them from the monotony of routine tasks, when possible.  Allow them to work on intensive, one-time projects that have visible results (i.e. designing a new sales campaign), or find a problem that has been plaguing your company or department for months or years and task them with fixing it.

Mentoring is another area that can be very rewarding for experienced and talented employees.  Let them work for a few hours per week with a younger, more inexperienced worker in a semi-formal relationship to pass on the company’s values, expectations, and culture.

These more rewarding jobs are often more motivating to employees than increased pay.  Losing talented and experienced workers because their jobs are not fulfilling is a problem for a business.  Like most problems, throwing money at it will not fix it, only delay the inevitable.

Employee boredom is one of the most widespread and under-reported problems in corporations today.  It is bad for workers and bad for employers.  Both parties can and should recognize this problem and take steps to correct it.  Work is better when you aren’t bored.