The hardest part of one’s job is usually trying to maintain your motivation.
That can be especially difficult following some extended time off, when work is slower than molasses going uphill in January or if you haven’t really had any sort of break from work for a long time.
There are a lot of times in one’s work life — regardless of what career they decided on, choose, ended up in, forced into or simply love — when they just can’t bare the thought of another day of plodding along for the next eight or whatever hours, just to go home, sleep and do it all again tomorrow.
And the two worst times of the year for this are those long, warm, sunny and extremely inviting days of summer and the long, sullen, dreary, white, lack of sunlight days that run from mid-December to sometime in February.
Some people simply give into the temptation to slack off, especially easy to do in the summer, while others procrastinate and the majority begrudgingly drag themselves out of bed to head to their job where they wallow in whatever work that needs to be done in a state of unproductiveness.
Now, I’ve been in several different jobs in various industries — media, firefighting, sales, customer service — and each one has had it’s own unique aspects that I loved, liked or simply tolerated, that was until I could move onto a job that didn’t bite.
However, even at the places I loved working at, there were days or weeks of ‘blah’ moments to go with the occasional time where quitting right then and there certainly entered my mind.
Remaining motivated during the down and dull times was always challenging.
In some jobs, I could make my own work to fill the voids and stave off boredom. Even then though, I wasn’t as successful as I thought as I found myself basically just killing time with something that never really accomplished anything.
Meanwhile at other posts, I was stuck doing the same thing over and over and over and over (alright, that’s enough) or longed to have a television or something else to keep occupied other than twiddling my thumbs.
Those were the worst jobs for me, especially because I despised not having something to do. It also didn’t help that those particular jobs were ones I had to take to have a paycheque.
Neither was it helpful they were jobs I had never done, that were all about ensuring you did everything by the book and for the customer, regardless of the consequences for yourself. I was never good at jumping to the beat of someone else’s drum, unless it was something I wanted to do.
Needless to say, I was never really motivated and did everything I could to find another job in a sector I liked and knew I could do well.
So, in essence, you could say I was extremely motivated, just not in the way those employers thought I should be. In fact, there was one job that was so horrid, I was doing job interviews over the phone while at work or taking ‘time off’ to do in-person interviews.
Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the best thing to do, but when you are desperate to evacuate from a situation, you tend to do things that you wouldn’t do in a normal circumstance.
What have I learned over the decades about being motivated?
Find a job or type of employment that makes you happy, that you can enjoy even when times are boring as the Nevada desert is filled with sand and you’ll be able to keep yourself involved, the mind active and find you won’t have to drag yourself out of bed or hit that snooze button as often on those early mornings.
But that is…just an observation.