5 Small Actions To Help You Enjoy Your Job if You Can’t Quit

Hate your job but can’t quit?

I won’t advocate for everyone to quit their jobs and start businesses because not everyone is cut out for self-employment.

So if you are one of those, or you just can’t quit yet, I have 5 practical actions you can do to minimise the hate and increase the enjoyment level in your job.

5 Small Actions To Help You Enjoy Your Job if you can’t quit

Action 1: Decorate your desk

‘Decorate your desk’  sounds like a lame suggestion, but it works to lift your mood.

Come to work early (or on a non-working day) and spend time beautifying your work space.

How do you start? With the un-fun stuff first - clearing all the unused papers, documents, rubbish lying on your desk or around it. So you have a clean slate to work with.

Then start pinning cheerful photos of you and your friends, your loved ones, pets, travel photos - which make you happy. (Please don’t pin photos which do nothing to make you feel good.)

When I was working as a counsellor, I had a picture of the Atlas mountains (taken during a trip to Morocco) pinned at my desk.

I chose it because I got a feeling of perspective of how vast and ‘big’ the world is, should I feel stressed or overwhelmed at work (usually over small matters).

Then, you can choose to add a small plant or two to give you some perspective whilst you are in the office.

Or just decorate it with pretty stationery.

You might have to ‘refresh’ your desk decor after a few weeks if you start feeling bored and tired of your workspace.

No inspiration? Head over to Google Images and search for ‘pretty workspace’ or something similar.

Action 2: Do something you love outside of work

You have to have a group of lovely people to hang out with on your weekends and evenings.

It can feel quite miserable to go straight home from work everyday with no social interaction.

No, we don’t have to hang out with friends and family every night, but slot at least 2 days a week to socialise.

Too lazy to go to fancy cafes for a meetup? Stroll over to a nearby Starbucks or coffee place and have tea with a friend. Or, invite friends over to your place.

And...you have to have a hobby. It keeps you sane during stressful times or when you feel bored out of your mind by your work.

Your hobbies might change as the weeks pass, but that’s okay. You don’t have to stick to 1 hobby.

You might like crafting this month, you might like cooking healthy food next month, you might like creating pretty printables on Adobe inDesign the following month, etc.

You can also take an inexpensive online course (on a subject you love) from Udemy or even learn a new basic skill or two from Youtube videos.

The following month, you might lose interest and jump on to a new topic, but that’s okay. That’s why I recommend inexpensive or free online courses - until you hit on a topic or skill that you really, really love and possibly create a side hustle from that.

If you love online shopping for pretty, high-quality clothes, I recommend lastcall.com - a Neiman Marcus discount website. Or even Asos. But only if you buy mindfully and make use of their return policies if a clothing item doesn’t suit you!

 

Action 3: Get to know your colleagues

This is a tricky one but if you are friends (to the extent of hanging out after work) with your colleagues, you actually look forward to going to work.

You start scouting for friends by narrowing them to people of

1. the same gender (it gets complicated to be friends with colleagues of the opposite gender).
2. And the same age range with you (3 years’ difference in age).

This is in assumption that you are working in different job positions within the same workplace (eg: you are a teacher and your colleague-friend is the school counsellor).

Basically, don’t make friends with colleagues you are ‘competing’ with, at the workplace. :D

Action 4: Clear your desk

Clearing your desk won’t immediately make you love your job, but it makes you calmer.

Clutter, mess, indeterminate pieces of paper can overwhelm you at work. (Not to mention being a breeding ground for roaches.)

If you can, go paperless and take photos of documents and upload them on your Google Drive account.

Using a Google Calendar is helpful. It will reduce the number of post-its, paper planners, notebooks on your table. You can view your tasks on the go too.

Some people like to use the Trello app, but I like to keep things simple by dumping all my tasks in a take-one-day-at-a-time format such as Google Calendar or any other calendar app.

Using Trello makes me a tad anxious when I see my boards and the list of to-dos inside each board.

Keep your workspace as minimalistic as possible to be calmer and reduce overwhelm everyday.

Be mindful of every item on your desk and in your drawers. Know exactly what each item is for.

 

Action 5: Bring Goodies for your colleagues

This simple gesture needs a low investment but reaps high returns.

It’s an underrated technique to boost your feel-good feelings at work!

How this works: You are bringing goodies to make your colleagues feel good about you and for you to feel good via being nice to others. It’s a win-win.

It’s as easy as giving everyone a piece of chocolate, a pretty pen, baked goods, a snack or two.

This giving act can raise the mood of the office instantly.

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