Part 3: Bored at work? How to recover your creativity
We all get bored sometimes at work. I had a job in my twenties where I could have taken a nap during the work day and no one would have noticed. That was worse for me than being too busy! Sometimes we get bored at our jobs because we don’t have enough to do, but sometimes it happens because we have lost our creative edge. And this can happen even if we are not in a creative field. Creative problem solving for example requires creativity. Figuring out how to handle that difficult client requires it. Regardless of the type of job you are in, creativity will be required in some way, shape or form. If you have lost it, how can you get it back?
Here are 5 ideas to help you get started on the right foot in January 2014:
1) Reach out – Get out of your office and get back to networking. Attend an association meeting this month. Meet new people or learn a new skill there by attending a presentation or workshop.
2) Connect and brainstorm – Leverage your colleagues in meetings, formal and informal. Bounce ideas off of them. Walk into their office and ask them if you can think out loud with them for a few minutes. Often, sharing with others helps us solidify an idea, or come up with a new one.
3) Journal or doodle – Keep a notepad handy where you can draw your ideas or simply write them down. Come back to them later. Seeing things in black and white, outside of our head, can help us not only be more objective about them but can also help us generate new ideas about how to handle them.
4) Step away – Writing them down and coming back to them can give us a fresh perspective. In the meantime maybe you spoke with a colleague and that gave you a new idea. Either way, that time off from the idea you have been struggling with can make a big difference in how you see it when you come back to it.
5) Do the same thing a different way – Mix up your routine. If you come to work at the same time every day, try a half hour earlier. Eat at the same place almost every day for lunch? Go somewhere completely new for a week. You don’t always have to change the task you perform in order to break the monotony, sometimes a different way of performing that task can do the trick.
Hallie Crawford
Ideal Career Coach
P.S. Are you in the ideal career for you? Find out if you’re in the right career with our Ideal Career Quiz.
