How To Deal With Boredom At Work
When you’re bored at work, your day probably drags on. It’s hard to enjoy your work or impress your boss when you have nothing to do. Fortunately, there are a few ways in which you can try to handle boredom in the workplace. Instead of counting down the hours, you can be productive and enhance your career.
Clean Up Your Desk
If you have papers strewn about your desk, you might find it difficult to get work done. Why not use your free time to organize yourself? When you eventually get busy, you will be more efficient than ever.
There’s another benefit to tidying your workspace. If you have a messy work station, your colleagues and supervisors might perceive you as disorganized. They may not respect you or give you all the responsibilities you want. By cleaning up, you can open up new doors.
To make the clean-up easier, you can stop by your favorite office supply store and pick up folders, trays, and binders. Use whatever supplies you need to stay organized. Then, when you decide to clean your desk, you won’t be overwhelmed by the work.
Keep Track of Achievements
In the craziness of the day, you may not have time to record your accomplishments. Your failure to keep track of your success could be to your detriment. For one, you might have low self-esteem. Secondly, you could have a hard time writing your resume when you decide to apply for a new position.
When you’re bored at work, make a list of all your accomplishments for the day, week, or month. You can include things as simple as completing a project on time or something more complex. This might be an opportunity to calculate your monthly sales or come up with another numerical way to measure your success.
If you’re not sure how to measure your achievements, check out a few resumes from individuals in your industry. You might be able to come up with a better way to keep track of your accomplishments. Just make sure you keep your notes in a place you can find later on in time.
Spice Up Your Resume
While you’re at it, take a look at your resume. How long has it been since you updated your resume? You might be content with your current position, but you never know when you will need a new job. Anything could happen, and you need to be ready to submit your resume. If you come across the perfect job, you should be able to pull up your resume and send it with confidence.
Update your resume with a list of your current job responsibilities, address, and other important details. You should also check the resume for grammatical errors and make sure it flows well. Every few months, try to update your resume or at least read it over.
Network with Old Contacts
You may not realize how many great connections you have in your network. If you don’t make an effort to stay in contact with your network, you could lose those relationships. The next time you have 30 minutes to spare, look up some of your contacts and send an email or message. To make the most of your networking, offer assistance with something.
You can also use this time to connect with new people. If you’re not already on LinkedIn, create a profile. You can also update your social media to have a professional flair.
Educate Yourself
There’s so much value in education, and technology makes it easier than ever to educate yourself. Instead of twiddling your thumbs at work, listen to an audiobook or watch an industry-relevant YouTube video. You can take advantage of free resources or pay to take an online course.
Whatever you do, don’t let your education make you unavailable from your job. If you’re someone who gets lost in podcasts or ebooks, only listen to them on your lunch break. It’s important to be present while you’re at work.
Help a Co-Worker
Your co-worker might be swamped as you sit there waiting for work. Rather than waste your own time, offer to help out your co-workers. Someone could be in desperate need of your assistance. As you help them, you could learn another part of the business or make a great impression on your boss.
And while you should never offer to help with the intention of getting anything back, you may benefit in another way. The next time you need a favor, your co-worker might be more likely to help.
Go Through Your Emails
One day is all it takes for an inbox to get out of control. If you need to kill some time, open up your email account and go through your emails. You can create folders, delete spam, and respond to messages that you’ve been putting off.
This is also an opportunity to unsubscribe from spam. Even if you keep your email address closely guarded, you could have hundreds of spam emails. Unsubscribe from all of your spam emails or find a service that will do it for you.
Search for Other Jobs
A perfect job could still leave you bored. However, you shouldn’t find yourself bored at work on a routine basis. If you aren’t engaged on a daily basis, you may have outgrown your job. You should either ask your boss for more responsibilities or seek out a new job.
People often settle for less than they deserve. If you want to fight boredom at work, find out what else is available. You might find that there are other jobs that pay better or will keep you busier. However, be careful about job hunting during work hours. You should avoid looking for jobs from your work computer and make sure no one finds out that you’re looking for work. If your boss finds out that you’re getting paid to look for new jobs, they won’t be happy.