Combatting OTJ Boredom

One problem I hear about from day job/after-hours arts people involves chronic boredom. Some of these people are bored because they've been doing the same work for 10 years or are in the wrong occupation for them.

Others are bored because the work itself is comprised mainly of repetitive tasks that, after a time, lull the worker into a state that makes it hard to focus. I've been there. As a student I once worked for a phone directory company. My job was to proofread entries, comparing two lists to make sure that every single name, address and phone number matched. After a summer of doing this, I felt like my brain was in danger of shrinking to the size of a pea and falling out of my head.

In the 20-plus years since then, I've discovered that all jobs, even the ones I love (including the current one) have rote or monotonous moments. I've experimented on the job, read books by others who do the same and polled friends to come up with a list of ways to deal with this:

• Even if your current job is, for you, just a stepping-stone, it still helps to have goals. Come up with one goal that will make your employer happy ("find a new repeat customer each week" or "increase my keyboarding speed to 70 wpm") and one that will make you happy ("meet someone who could help me publicize my business" or "find a coworker who's also a writer/artist/musician/whatever).
• Decide that work is only one part of the career called Life, and find ways to help your job serve your purpose or passion. Depending on what your job entails, this may be fairly easy or a real stretch. Challenge yourself to find one thing during each workday that will help you move forward in whatever you consider your life's work. It can include locating a resource you can use, finding a sympathetic coworker who'd love to have lunch and talk about goals, or getting a marketing idea from a conversation you overhear while working the floor. The most important thing you can do is to make the decision; everything else follows from that.
  
• Play mind games that help you focus when you're doing something repetitive. At one job I pretended that the job itself was a test - I wouldn't be able to find my dream job until I could perform my current job with complete mindfulness all day long. You can only take this idea so far but it works for awhile.
• Commit to finding a really good friend or creative partner at work. This will make you extend yourself - greet people you'd normally overlook, strike up conversations with strangers and test the waters to see who might be receptive to your ideas.
• As one author advises, "be excellent" to everyone - colleagues, supervisors, customers - as much as humanly possible. I know that if you have a lot of public contact, you're sometimes on the receiving end of jerkish behavior. Focus on the good people. You never know who might lead you to your next valuable contact.
• Keep an ongoing log of accomplishments, projects and new skills you've learned. This will not only help you realize how valuable you are in your current workplace, it will also make it easier to write a resume and verbal pitch to prospective employers if you're job-hunting or in danger of being laid off.
  
• For extra credit, figure out how each of these skills can help you further your off-hours work. If you're a sales associate, you can use your sales skills to pitch a book idea to an agent. If you're an administrative assistant, your organizing abilities will come in handy when your garage band is ready to get bookings.
  

Your time on the job doesn't have to be a matter of just killing time - your job can feed your art and vice versa. If you're interested in exploring this theme further, I've put together a list of my favorite books on Amazon's Listmania. Most of them are in the FVRL collection and those that aren't are available in used paperback form for as little as a penny on Amazon.