Career Trap- How To Make Your Work More Enjoyable?    

While some are fortunate enough to land a job they look forward to in the morning, others have to content themselves with mediocre, boring ones, or worse, horrible ones. It is a career trap here! No excuses needed; there are bills we have to settle after all.

But because work takes up a large portion of our day, how we feel about it affects our everyday mood, motivation, productivity, and outlook in life, even when we are home from work. It is for this reason that it is important to actually make an effort to enjoy your job more. What many fail to realize but is no secret is that there are actually very simple ways anyone can do to have a better and more enjoyable time doing their jobs. By this, we do not only mean how you can increase productivity at work; we are also talking about concrete ways that affect your overall well being and state of mind that affect your happiness in your current job, even in indirect ways.

Lend a helping hand

While maintaining healthy competition is helpful for motivation and bringing out the people’s potentials, it is important to help out a coworker or colleague in need of help, or to teach and share your talents to newbies in your field.

Help can be given in many different forms and sizes, and even if your help is not always noticed, do not let it discourage you from making it a habit. You will do well-making friends and connections throughout your career than enemies. Fostering emerging talent will also earn you loyal, highly-skilled people.

Keep things organised and clean

According to a study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, living surrounded by clutter is shown to lead to depression and higher stress levels. The same study shows that how you organise your working space also affects your performance and the quality of your output/work.

Here are some steps you can take to a cleaner, more organised work environment:

• Get a planner and utilize your calendar and sticky notes. This will help you keep track of your daily tasks and progress so you can adjust accordingly and make sure you finish your work by the end of the day (or reach your quota, if applicable).
• Allocate a few minutes of your break daily to clean and reorganise your table/work area.

Remind yourself of your goal

Most of the times we dread waking up in the morning to get to work, it is because we focus too much on the short term and lose sight of our main goal. Think long term and look at the bigger picture. Remember once more why you took that job in the first place. Do you need to pay the bills? Are you saving up for a business idea or investment? Are you doing the work to train yourself and learn about the industry? Whatever your reason may be, focus on it when getting to work becomes a difficult ‘chore’. Treat the struggles, failures, and mistakes as your training ground in order to be highly skilled and knowledgeable in your field.

Set standards for yourself

It does not do well to stress yourself too much; however, never get too comfortable and laidback. Keep aiming high and pushing yourself to do your best and contribute as much as you can. Learn to find the joy in being productive and doing great work, even if it means doing tasks you do not really like or enjoy.

Keep yourself grounded

One common reason why people are unhappy with their jobs is that they think they deserve to be doing something better or more meaningful rather than their current jobs. While this might be a sign to look for a new job, there are some who take this sense of entitlement too far. What’s problematic is false entitlement can sink you lower than get you high up your career ladder.

If this is your reason why you are not pleased with your current occupation, make sure it’s a justified and authentic sense of entitlement; this means you need to be able to back your claims up with documents, certifications, statistics, recommendations, reviews/ratings, and other papers.

Keep yourself busy

Unhappiness in the workplace can also root from overthinking and sometimes, boredom. Overthinking usually happens when you have a lot of time on your hands; considering that, a solution would be to keep yourself occupied with your tasks and projects. Even when you are stuck in a job you hate, see the value in the experience itself and how it can hone your skills and patience and make you stronger, both as a professional and as an individual.

If you find that your work is not that time-consuming and leaves you a lot of time to spare, find a hobby you will enjoy and devote yourself to practising it during your free time.

Build healthy relationships with co-workers/employees

Even when you despair going to work and doing things you find boring, having friends at work can motivate you to get through the day somehow.

Here are some tips on improving your relationships at work:

• Be positive. Keep encouraging them and praise them when credit is due. Provide constructive criticisms, not the ones that are only meant to put them down.
• Remember that communication works two ways: you do not only talk, but you also listen. Many seem to find the latter much more difficult, but if you want to minimise misunderstandings and arguments, getting to hear what each other has to say is highly important and will greatly affect how you all work together and even how you produce your outputs individually.

Regularly exercise

You are probably wondering what exercising has to do with how you can be happier at work. The thing is, you have to look at exercising more than a way of losing weight, getting fit, and keeping your body in shape. Numerous studies have already shown that regular exercise. This is because when we exercise, our body produces and releases Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor. This protein enhances our learning process as well as our memory.

On top of that, working out also increases one’s alertness because it allows better blood circulation to your brain. There are many other benefits from regularly exercising, but another important one is that it helps improve your mental health as it triggers production of “happy chemicals” in our bodies and reduces stress levels significantly. If you want to lessen your number of leaves and sick days, exercising can also help you greatly at that.

It’s all a chain, you see. Exercising means improved physical and mental health and enhanced sleep, better sleep means better mood and more energy at work, and better mood and higher levels of energy and creativity can lead to increased productivity.