How to Be More Productive - 5 Tips to Keep You From Being Bored at Work

If you are bored at work, you know how painful each and every day can be. The hours tend to drag by with no end in sight. Minutes can feel like hours and months can feel like years. While some people elect to combat their circumstances by playing solitaire, or by surfing the internet, there are ways to simultaneously increase the enjoyment you experience and be more productive at work.

In order to help you stay focused, and prevent you from being bored, give these five things a chance. You may be pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

1. Determine Why You Are Bored - Is your job too easy? Are you being underutilized in your current position? The first thing you must do to be more effective is to simply figure out what it is that you hate about your job. Most people will find that they have never slowed down long enough to figure out what it is exactly that they do not like. They simply complain and belly ache but choose to do nothing about it.

Many times a college students select their majors based upon what they think will provide them the jobs they desire upon graduation. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. There are literally thousands of college graduates that are selling insurance, even though the graduated with a finance degree. While there is nothing wrong with selling insurance for a living, I can guarantee that most of these students did not envision themselves in that position while studying late into the night.

Just because you are in a job now does not mean that this has to be the same job that you have for the rest of your life. Think about where you want to be in five or ten years.

2. Create Long Term Goals - If you are failing to plan you are planning to fail. There is no way around it. Unless you plan the path you want to take how will you ever know when you have arrived.

Start small and create a few weekly goals. These can be as simple as get to work on time five days in a row, or limit your coffee breaks to two or three per day. I did a small experiment in my office and found that some people actually take ten coffee breaks a day. To be honest with you, I can almost guarantee that they have no idea how often they stop to talk or gossip.

Once you have successfully completed a few weekly goals, create a monthly or quarterly goal. If you are one of those employees who like to use sick days as soon as they accrue, try banking four or five days. It is pretty cool knowing that you may actually have a few days available should you truly get sick.

Yearly goals should focus on your overall career objectives. Do you plan on staying with your current company for more than one year? What about two years? If not, where do you see yourself? Do you have the education needed to get you there?

3. Educate Yourself - What are you interested in? Is it even in a related field to your current profession? Dave Ramsey always says that who you will be in five years will be the same as today except for the people that you meet and the books that you read.

Our nation's public library system is a truly magnificent resource. It is also extremely underutilized. One way to be more productive at work is to simply check out, and read, a book from the library. It is FREE, by the way.

Select something that you can use at work and then ask your boss to assign a few new related tasks to your job.

4. Constantly Seek to Challenge Yourself - Why settle for who you are now when you can always be so much more? Simply coasting by in life is boring in and of itself! Instead of waiting for your boss to assign you something that you definitely DO NOT want to do, ask him or her for additional tasks that interest you. Not only will you like it more, you will also do a better job, which will increase your overall value to the firm.

If you happen to have an entry level position, it is so easy to appear more productive to your boss or superior. Think about the things that he or she has to do on a daily basis, which they hate, and figure out a way that you could help them either do it, or do it faster. It can be as simple as making a few client calls or as advanced as compiling the latest financial results from the first quarter. Simply asking to help will help you become more productive at work!

5. Pick Up a New Hobby - If all else fails, pick up a new hobby that you enjoy. If you choose not to challenge yourself at work, try and make yourself happier at home. Typically, this can result in becoming more productive at work simply because you are happier at home.

Besides sitting in front of the TV, which only magnifies the boredom factor, what things do you enjoy doing? Are you in decent cardiovascular condition? If not, why don't you challenge yourself to walk a couple miles each night? Better yet, join a gym and actually use it.

Learn how to build a website or blog. There are thousands of wonderful resources available that help make the learning curve a snap. Instead of spending hours surfing the net, why not spend that time creating a valuable piece of internet real estate for yourself? Who knows, in a few months you may be able to make enough money to quit your day job (I do not recommend quitting before you actually try it).

Contentment tends to produce more contentment. You do not have to settle for a boring, and unproductive, life. Determine why you are bored, create a few long term goals, educate yourself, challenge yourself as often as possible and if all else fails find yourself an enjoyable hobby and be happy.

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