Bored at work is a problem? And in a cubicle? You have the internet in your pocket and bluetooth headphones in your ears, no work to do, you're getting paid, and people are complaining about this?
I seriously hope this article is part of some shadowy PR campaign to make people work harder or justify austerity or something. It's hard to believe this is BBC.
> What happens more often, she says, is that people will just show up at their desks and spend time shopping online, cyberloafing, chatting with colleagues or planning other activities. She says that these people aren’t lazy, but are using these behaviours as “coping mechanisms”.
Shopping online, talking to friends, and planning other activities are all things everyone needs to do. They're not coping mechanisms, this is just people getting all their stuff done at work so they have more time to do things important to them.
> Harju describes boreout as “kind of a signature syndrome” of the pandemic; our ennui fueled by too much time in Zoom meetings, surrounded by the same four walls.
Does Harju understand that the organization has made the decision to pay people to attend them?
How anyone can see a job as anything other than a way to sell time for money is beyond me.
Being bored at work would be wonderful. Being bored remote is even better. If I could just get the paycheck and benefits and have absolutely 0 obligations to the company, that would be optimal.
It's fine for the first couple of weeks. Maybe even the first few months. But when one third of your life or more is spent with absolutely no meaning what so ever, when you hands feel tied behind your back due to certain obligations / job prospects / whatever, it wears you down. It did for me. It drove me to the point of wanting to end it all.
I really hope you're never properly bored at work.
I’m so sorry that it got so bad for you. I recently quit my job because I was in that situation. I literally had nothing to do. I had maybe 8 hours of actual work a week. Paid really well to do basically nothing all things considered but it drained my soul. Being at home made it more tolerable but after cooking, baking, reading, side projects, getting my side hustle off the ground, exercising, starting an herb garden, taking up sketching, finishing my entertainment backlog, I don’t even know anymore I just couldn’t do it.
There’s something so terribly draining about having so much “kinda free time” where I might have to do random tasks sporadically but is otherwise completely empty.
It sounds like a joke but: if they company was paying you and giving you good performance reviews, your effort was obviously meeting expectations. Why didn't you get an additional full-time job?
I've worked remotely for a long time. I've always had this dream of pushing through my work early in the week so I can fit in a round of golf or a few hours of skiing on a Friday morning. It's panned out less than 5 times because something always comes up on a Friday morning.
It may be a personality thing. I was in that situation and I didn't find it having "absolutely no meaning whatsoever." It was a time to learn, research new technology, experiment, etc. I was in that situation for at least two years before the company went under.
It was before widespread internet, so I can imagine that if I had the net in my pocket it would only have been so much better.
[edit]
I had forgotten about this, but ironically, a few years earlier the company started selling a software package that was written by an engineer in a similar situation. He worked at a water plant and his job was basically to sit there all day occasionally checking some gauges to make sure everything was OK. Since he had essentially all day free with no one caring what he did, he wrote a complete software application.
I was once in a position where I had nothing to do for around 5 months straight after starting a job. It was an open office plan, we were clocked in 9-5, and I had a supervisor from another team who sat across from me and meant to keep an eye on me. I was also young and naive enough that I didn't know how far I could push limits slacking, so I didn't really push them at all. I desperately pleaded with everyone for work, but was always told the equivalent of "next sprint we'll have some for you, go read some documentation for now!".
I had never been more depressed in my life than those 5 months.
The closest thing I could compare it to is imagine printing out a copy of your current project's documentation, locking yourself in a room with it for 8 hours, then doing that 100 more times. It's a special type of hell.
No matter how well you think you can divorce your work time from your personal time, it starts to cross over. Work becomes so boringly painful that you actively dread it even in your time off. You know that tomorrow you're going to have to wake up and pretend to stare at documentation. For hours. And hours. And hours. And then repeat that the next day. And the next. And the next - with no end in sight.
The way I see it, "work time" is usually quite a big chunk of a person's life, especially if you throw in commute time. It also tends to take out the most "useful" time of the day.
Want to go hiking? Swimming in a river? Build some furniture? Build a house? Watch birds? Go shopping? Wrench on your car? Race your motorcycle? All are best done during the "work hours".
So while I can see the appeal of not tying one's meaning to one's job, I also completely understand the sinking feeling of having to postpone these activities for doing... nothing.
Because even though you can "find something to do" while at work, most of the time, you're not fully free. You may not just pick up your stuff and go fishing. You have to stay physically at the office and sometimes even have people dropping by asking random questions. So even getting engrossed in a book / music is out, since you'll be randomly interrupted. At least if you're WFH you can do random chores to free up the time afterwards (do the dishes / laundry / bake a pizza).
Of course, if you have to work to live, you have to go through this. But I don't see how its being necessary can make it less soul-crushing. Quite the contrary. I'm lucky enough to be able to find things to do on my own, or if not, work for one of my hobbies which happen to involve computers and don't require me to be physically somewhere precise. But not everyone's so lucky.
I don't know. Why do you like chocolate ice cream? At least for me, despite all my efforts in every direction, the things I like or dislike fail to alter themselves that much at my request.
I have mechanisms to deal with them and to ensure that I do certain things, but the inner will always directs in a certain direction. I can summon the motivation to do other things, but I have so far failed to modify that inner desire.
If you're different, then do share what interventions let you modify.
Given that, your question is more like "Why would you like chocolate ice cream?". And the answer is simple: There is no 'why'; there only is.
All meaningful progress requires labor. You're specifically talking about labor paid for by a corporation, but that isn't mutually exclusive with that labor also being a goal or passion that you're interested in.
Meaning is subjective, and many do find it in their work. For example, many software devs like the work of learning about and creating software. To be paid for it is a bonus, not something detracting.
You are missing that people are different. It seems extremely easy and intuitive to compartmentalize aspects of your life.
More power to you. Not everyone is like that. Personally, I find compartmentalization unnatural.
Even the “work hard play hard” aspect of weekday/weekend. Unnatural to me. I do think everything has seasons. I don’t view those seasons as literally on an hourly granularity though, that’s what is unnatural to me.
> Work time is labor time for me, and any amount of it is actively detracting from me being able to pursue the things that I do think have meaning.
Exactly, that's the problem. The article is not about not having enough work to do, it's about the work not having enough meaning to want to do it in the first place.
Also the issue that generally you still need the job (because you need income) and more importantly, you need to ensure you have a usable reference from your time there.
Of course you could see it that way. However, what about ethics? If work is just some no meaning thing to do, will you care about the ethical aspects of your work? And I think we need a lot more of that in tech jobs.
No, if you straight up do "fun things" (watch movies or play video games) then you won't be motivated to work even when it's time for "boreout" to end. So you must do "work safe" activities that wont get you fired all day which is worse than doing boring work that lets you feel useful.
It's not guilt that's the problem. Just because you're in a remote work situation doesn't mean you just stop thinking about the boring shit that you do. Meetings also don't stop. You get angrier and angrier about the whole situation. It nags on you and actually spend more time thinking about it than you would normally spend on it outside of work.
I guess there are quite a lot of people that can just tune out things they don't like, but I'd wager most people are not capable of that trait. I think the more competent you are the more it bothers you not to produce anything. And it's not related to guilt, at least it never was for me(and looking around in this thread I'm obviously not the only one).
Just because you are paid doesn't mean you want to pass your life without perspective. This is basically someone sucking your life away without drive or mission and only compensating in money. And if there is any truth to the "Drive!" book, then the money is almost secondary to the other two factors.
This is simply not the case once you’ve been in that situation long enough. It’s pretty terrible. I would rather have lots of busywork than be sitting on my hands with nothing to do yet still have the obligation for the company.
Working on something due to lack of work during a zoom meeting is entirely different than doing something in my own time when I have zero obligation to get called out of it at any moment. This prevents Deep Work from occurring. It’s thoroughly unsatisfying, and work is simply not just “time for money”.
The shopping online etc that they’re referring to is being done out of boredom, not out of necessity. It’s a dopamine loop. Same with browsing social media or chatting online.
Please don’t dismiss people and handwave when they’re trying to discuss issues.
Would love to be in a situation like this. How do you find a job that lets you do nothing? I’d be happy to work on personal projects, learning new things, working a second job, etc
You have to account for what you're doing with your time and how it benefits the company and demonstrate that you're making progress. Unless you're better at managing a complex set of lies than most human beings, you're probably not going to succeed at it.
Well, these situations usually involve you having to be physically present and won't allow you to be out of office randomly for hours at a time. So that limits the kind of second job you could take.
Also, many people work on fairly locked down computers with nothing much to do aside for (filtered) internet and random "corporate" apps. I'd be quite surprised to learn that in these kinds of situations, where people are required to be physically present to do nothing, they would be allowed to bring in their own computers and openly do private stuff.
Clearly you have never been in this situation. I once held a job where I had exactly one hour of work to do each day and nothing else to do. If I put my mind to it, I could finish a weeks’s worth of work in half a day. The rest was wasted time and waiting around. Plus, someone else controlled my time. I had to sit in my chair at my desk for eight hours, take a one hour lunch break in the middle of the city, never leaving the office otherwise.
You have no control over the most important parts for the largest part of your waking day. You are asked to do meaningless busywork that wouldn’t need to be done at all if automated even in a half-assed way. There is zero reason for you to sit in the office all day, wasting hours upon hours except for your boss mandating it. 100% of the non-automated remaining parts of your job could be done remotely, by telephone and email.
This crushes you eventually, depending on personality type sooner or later, especially when your mind is accustomed to tackling and solving problems. It grinds away at your sense of self, drains you of energy, it quite literally drives you slowly insane. You try not to think about it but you do. You try to read, surf the internet, stay in touch with others and do all the things you can do somewhat stealthy. Because when you eventually ask for more stuff to do, you get assigned to sorting contents of binders. Because, according to my boss at the time, “there’s always something to do”. Busywork. Got it.
It makes you depressed, severely so. You realize that nothing you do matters at all and there’s no point to your job anyway. Every trivial task eventually becomes an immense burden that sometimes takes you days to complete, despite being a 30-minute task. In a way this means you have come full circle. You feel your mind rotting away. You feel that you have reached the end of your rope and this is what your life will be from now on. But if you raise your voice and speak up, all it earns you is the scorn of the boss and other (really bad) colleagues that want things to stay as they are.
Some companies may well have an expectation of owning your time regardless of outcome and some people may well be cynical and empty enough to live with this situation, I for one would rather be dead.
It took me four years and a nervous breakdown to finally throw the towel, with no regard for what happened to me afterwards. Yeah, quite a walk in the park those jobs are. Relaxing. Quite ideal.
As others have said, being bored at work is extremely stressful. I am on the verge of leaving a company where I'm totally bored, for an early stage startup where I will be put to the grind. Oddly when I was in such a job before I had the energy to do other projects. I made the time. Now I have the time but it seems.... Meaningless. I am a developer who codes for fun as well, but in the last year I have not written any code worth talking about. My job is a joke because of how badly organized the company is. I went to therapy, tried to see if I had ADHD because I was slowly sinking back into my old habits of jumping between tasks and not prioritising work. Ultimately I decided I need to leave the company because it wasn't me. I was a bad cultural fit because I'm a person who does things for fun. Work was not fun. It was killing me.
Generally the case is that there is still way to much to do, so you can't do your own thing: but your assigned tasks are meaningless. Think of being paid to dig a hole and fill it in again, and you will be fired if you don't spend your time doing that, even though the net effect would be the same if you just did nothing.
The result is the double whammy of being burnt out by an avalanche of meaningless tasks.
I sometimes experience “boreout” on days where most of my team members are on holidays or when it’s a bit slow at work. However I still have to be “at the computer” even if I’m not doing anything. On the days I am bored, I don’t have motivation to even shop or cyberloaf. With remote work I literally touch my mouse, make sure my teams status is green, walk away and do something else at home. Sucks because I can never disconnect from work for the day. I wish we would advance quicker into performance based / tasks oriented work rather than just needing to be available.
The zero obligations is the gotcha here: you’re still responsible for making decisions based on the boring meetings that take up your entire day.
And since people think they can fill up your calendar with meetings they do and then you’re only left with time outside of work think about mundane issues — which probably have some major consequences but who cares as you’ve sat through dozens of hours of meetings about it.
Bored at work is a problem? And in a cubicle? You have the internet in your pocket and bluetooth headphones in your ears, no work to do, you're getting paid, and people are complaining about this?
I seriously hope this article is part of some shadowy PR campaign to make people work harder or justify austerity or something. It's hard to believe this is BBC.
People work for money. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A81DYZh6KaQ
> What happens more often, she says, is that people will just show up at their desks and spend time shopping online, cyberloafing, chatting with colleagues or planning other activities. She says that these people aren’t lazy, but are using these behaviours as “coping mechanisms”.
Shopping online, talking to friends, and planning other activities are all things everyone needs to do. They're not coping mechanisms, this is just people getting all their stuff done at work so they have more time to do things important to them.
> Harju describes boreout as “kind of a signature syndrome” of the pandemic; our ennui fueled by too much time in Zoom meetings, surrounded by the same four walls.
Does Harju understand that the organization has made the decision to pay people to attend them?
How anyone can see a job as anything other than a way to sell time for money is beyond me.
Being bored at work would be wonderful. Being bored remote is even better. If I could just get the paycheck and benefits and have absolutely 0 obligations to the company, that would be optimal.