Nothing worse than to have to face going to work at a job that is simply a downer. It affects every aspect of your life, and not in a good way. But you can change that.
How?
Apply a different strategy of thinking about your job. There are many such strategies.
GAMING: introduce some form of a safe and reasonable game into your job, or the tasks, or, if the tasks allow, among colleagues. Here’s my one and only example for this Nugget. One of my early jobs was to do metallurgical testing of steel samples, hundreds of them daily. Since every sample was within specification, though there always is variation within the specification, I challenged myself to find the most perfect sample before my shift ended.
VALUE STREAM: Jobs are always more interesting if one understands how important their efforts are to the needs of both corporations and customers. To help you better understand how your mundane, repetitious job relates to the overall results of the factory, speak with, (unofficially interview), almost everyone connected to your activity or your product: the truck driver who delivers raw materials, people in your receiving and shipping department, those on the floor who handle the product, office staff involved in tracking or accounting, and so on. Understand how many lives, on the job, are touched by what you do. If your job allows, such as sales, marketing or management, learn how the customer is affected.
EXPERIMENT: Now be careful with this one. I am not advocating that you go bonkers and do weird stuff on the job. I’m suggesting you do research to find ways to help make your tasks more efficient, productive, meaningful, thorough, etc. Read of the successes others have had doing jobs or tasks similar to yours. Try to bring their techniques to your job, without going too far astray with this. Some techniques may be so different that you may need to seek permission from your supervisor(s) or even, at times, the board of directors of your corporation, if your experiment has a major effect on the corporation or its brand/reputation.
ASK A COLLEAGUE/PREDECESSOR: Speak with someone who has done your type of job and succeeded, especially if they received a promotion following their exit from that job.
SYNCHRONIZE and SYNERGIZE: This is a fancy way of saying: optimize your efforts to be a better fit with others who depend upon receiving your output. If it is true anywhere, it is especially true within corporations that “no person is an island”. What you do affects other departments and people within your company and, especially, external to your company. Internally, you can make great friendships and great working relationships by discovering how to improve your output to the benefit of others.
