How to overcome boredom and find flow in your job.
Monotony, tedium and boredom can creep into any job or career. After a while, you master the learning curve. You develop proficiency that doesn’t deliver the same rush as practicing and learning and figuring out something new.
When not fully engaged, the mind wanders. It starts to search for new stimulation. In this search, boredom and anxiety can set it in.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a professor of psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University and co-director of the Quality of Life Research Center. The QLRC is a non-profit research institute that studies “positive psychology”; that is, human strengths such as optimism, creativity, intrinsic motivation, and responsibility.
Csikszentmihalyi has found that maximum engagement and maximum enjoyment are the keys to resisting boredom. When engagement and enjoyment come together they create what he calls “flow.” Sometimes this is known as “being in the zone” in sports or “aesthetic rapture” in the arts.
Flow is that experience of being so immersed in something that you lose track of time and nothing else matters. Your concentration is so intense that the mind has no time to wander.
Not surprisingly, flow occurs most often in a work setting since work has goals and performance measures. The best jobs adequately match challenges with skills. When those are out of balance, you get boredom and anxiety.
Csikszentmihalyi explains how to find flow in a job:
“…there are many ways to make one’s job produce flow. A supermarket clerk who pays genuine attention to customers, a physician concerned about the total well-being of patients, or a news reporter who considers truth at least as important as sensational interest when writing a story, can transform a routine job into one that makes a difference.
Turning a dull jot into one that satisfies our need for novelty and achievement involves paying close attention to each step involved, and then asking: Is this step necessary? Can it be done better, faster, more efficiently? What additional steps could make my contribution more valuable? If, instead of spending a lot of effort trying to cut corners, one spent the same amount of attention trying to find ways to accomplish more on the job, one would enjoy working-more and probably be more successful. When approached without too many cultural prejudices and with a determination to make it personally meaningful, even the most mundane job can produce flow.”
He also discusses how to combat stress at work which is usually created when skills and challenges are out of synch:
“The same type of approach is needed for solving the problem of stress at work. First, establish priorities among the demands that crowd into consciousness. Successful people often make lists or flowcharts of all the things they have to do, and quickly decide which tasks they can delegate or forget, and which ones they have to tackle personally, and in what order. The next step is to match one’s skills with whatever challenges have been identified. There will be tasks we feel incompetent to deal with. Can you learn the skills required in time? Can you get help? Can the task be transformed, or broken into simpler parts? Usually the answer to one of these questions will provide a solution; that transforms a potentially stressful situation into a flow experience.”
Flow inspires and motivates. It keeps the mind occupied so it has no time to be bored.
How can you create more flow in your job? Do you need more challenges to go with your increased skills? Do you need help in order to fill a gap in your skills, and thereby reduce stress?
Finding the right balance for you and your team will create flow – and fun – and help you beat boredom.
Have a great week.
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