Thank you all for your huge support during my book launch.
One of the many tactics I focused on to launch Your Grass is Greener was LinkedIn.
I’ve never been big on social media, so I worked hard to engage in a way that I felt would be helpful to others, not just add more noise.
At first I really liked the challenge of trying to figure it all out. But over time I started to dread LinkedIn.
I burned out of linking in.
So, right after the book launched, I decided to cut the tactic altogether.
And that’s the moment I realized I was making the very same mistake I wrote an entire book to help people avoid.
Do you enjoy your job?
The more you enjoy your job, the better you do at it. Enjoyment isn’t fluff, it’s fuel for more (and better) achievement.
One of the most common pushbacks I hear when talking about joy on your job is that you can’t just stop doing the work you need to do just because you don’t like it.
It’s a misconception that enjoying your job is about changing what work you have to do. It’s not. It’s about changing how you do whatever work you need to get done.
Here’s how to get a baseline of your work enjoyment today:
Grab a piece of paper and on the left side write a list of activities at work that you enjoy doing (e.g., brainstorming, writing code, etc.)
On the right side of your page write a list of all of the activities you spent your time on last week (open up your calendar to do this well)
For every “I enjoy” activity on the left, draw a line to any matching “I did” activity on the right
How many lines did you draw?
How to enjoy your job more
If you want to enjoy your job more, do more of what you enjoy doing.
The trick is taking a deliverable and figuring out a way to get it done that incorporates something you enjoy. I didn’t need to stop LinkedIn because it wasn’t enjoyable, I needed to change how I was doing it.
If you want to build more joy at your job, take one task you need to accomplish tomorrow and think of a way to get it done using any of the “I enjoy” items from your list above.
Do that every day and you’ll be enjoying your job more and more (and doing better at it too) before you know it!
Drinking my own Kool-Aid
I really enjoy answering people’s career questions. So I’m piloting an idea called Q&J where I’ll collect questions from people and answer them every week on LinkedIn.
I’m looking for hard questions like how to handle a challenging conversation with your boss, negotiating a raise, or even realigning your work with what you enjoy.
I’ll also dedicate an article here to sharing the most popular questions and answers from the previous month. Think of it like a relationship advice column, only focused on your success at work instead of your significant other at home.
If you have a question you’d like to hear me weigh in on, you can ask it here.
And I’d love to know what you think about my idea:
Q&J is my answer to building more joy at my job.
My question to you is: What’s yours?
Try it yourself: Pick an important task from your to-do list and figure out how to accomplish it leveraging at least one activity you enjoy.
You’ll do better at it and enjoy your job more along the way too.
😂 P.S. A terrible joke, try not to laugh…
I asked the corporate wellness officer, “Can you teach me yoga?” They asked, “How flexible are you?”
I said, “I can’t do Tuesdays.”