Category: Happy At Work

With thanks to Kathy Sierra for letting
me borrow her visual style for a blogpost.

Except of course that her stuff looks much better :o)

After one of my recent speaking gigs about happiness at work, one participant told me this story:

I work as a programmer in a major bank. I used to go in every week, work my 40 hours (more like 50, but hey) and get paid a nice salary. It was a nice job in a good company, my boss was a good guy, my co-workers were neat people and the work was OK.

But as time passed, I felt like something was missing. Work was comfortable and secure, but I felt that there were sides of me that I never really got to use. I wanted to do work I could really feel proud of. I wanted to make more of a difference. And mostly, I was never really excited about work.

So I asked myself what it would take to improve things. I came up with three things:

1. Being more creative and working on more varied projects, as opposed to only maintaining the bank’s internal programs.
2. More fun at work. The mood in the department was very serious and professional, to the point of being boring.
3. Learning some new professional skills.

I asked my boss about this and he was very supportive. We drew up a plan for some courses and certifications and found some new tasks that I could work on. We recruited some like-minded allies in the group and worked on lightening the mood in the group together.

To my surprise, this didn’t just change my work life a little, it made a big difference. With my new skills, new projects and a more positive mood at work, I went from feeling OK about my job to feeling really great about it.

I do much better work as well. Partly because I’ve increased my skills and increased my work experience but mainly because I feel so much more enthusiastic about work now. The difference between being OK with my job and being happy about it has been huge for me.

Most job satisfaction surveys can divide people into three groups:

• People who HATE their jobs. Usually around 10%
• People who like their jobs. Around 70-80% of us.
• People who LOVE their jobs. Usually around 10-20%

This may sound strange coming from me, but I’m deadly serious here: Do not like your job.

Liking your job is nice. It’s comfortable. It’s safe. It’s OK. When you like your job you’re pretty efficient. You’re fairly satisfied. You can get by for years on liking your job.

But when you LOVE your job – MAN, what a difference that makes.
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Search for procrastination on google and you’ll find a massive number of articles on how to stop procrastinating and get stuff done.

They will tell you that there is only one reliable way to get stuff done:

1. Check todo-list for next item
2. Complete item no matter what it is
3. Go to step 1

They’ll tell you that if only you had enough willpower, backbone, self-control and discipline this is how you would work too.

Well guess what: Most people don’t work that way. Sometimes you’re in the mood for task X and doing X is ridiculously easy and a lot of fun. Sometimes doing X feels worse than walking barefoot over burning-hot, acid-covered, broken glass and forcing yourself to do it anyway is a frustrating exercise in futility.

Sometimes procrastinating is exactly the right thing to do at a particular moment. This is largely ignored by the procrastination-is-a-sign-of-weakness, the-devil-finds-work-for-idle-hands crowd.
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