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Bored with Your Job? The Recipe for Enjoying Your Work | Scott H Young
Make Boring Tasks More Interesting
You tend to start daydreaming spontaneously when you don’t have something harder to do. To make boring tasks more engaging:
- Up your game. Even a slight increase in standards is often enough to make your focus sharper.
- Measure your performance, keep track of it as you go and make the stakes higher for whatever you’re doing.
- Do it differently. If you change up your explicit strategy, removing the ability to do it by rote, you can increase engagement.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Flow is the state of mind
... where we are so immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity that we lose sense of space and time.
It is thought to be t...
Why it’s hard to achieve flow in your workplace
- The processes, policies, and busy work gets in the way.
- Most jobs don’t have a clear goal.
- Feedback can be inadequate.
- The pace of work has increased, and it’s hard for people to spend time thinking deeply.
- Your skills aren’t well matched to the challenges you are allowed to pursue.
- There’s a lack of control over interruptions or when and how you work.
- The job doesn’t push you out of your comfort zone.
Take more risks
... to push your mind beyond its comfort zone. Flow happens when we get a bit out of our comfort zone. Too much, and you get anxious; Too little and you get bored.
You need to know your physical or emotional limitations and consciously push past them.
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Key Ideas
“I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow—the state in which people are so involve..."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Defining Flow
Being in a state of flow means being immersed in the activity you are doing that you forget abut the outside world.
And you are most likely to reach this state when your skills are well-matched with your goal’s challenge.
Achieving Flow
- Set specific goals, that are aligned to your purpose, passions and values.
- Focus all your attention to the task in front of you.
- Enjoy the moment, and do not worry about the result
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Key Ideas
Good Rituals for Focused Work
- A good ritual should be accessible most of the time you plan to work. If you focus best in a library, but it is closed on weekends when you need it, it is not a good rit...
Using Noise-Cancelling Headphones
Wearing headphones can block out some of the ambient sounds and create a subtle barrier to being interrupted.
Regular headphones with some sounds playing will also do the trick. But researchers found listening to music with lyrics caused a decline in performance while white noise wasn't found to have the same impact.
The Distractions We Can Control
For any focused work session, we should prevent the distractions we can control.
- Allow only a select few emergency channels to go through and interrupt you. Turn off all other notifications on your phone and computer.
- Ensure your email inbox is closed.
- Pack your phone away to minimise the impulse to check your phone.
- Schedule short focused check-in times for essential emails.