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Anyone who believes the old maxim that “only boring people get bored” has never spent an afternoon proofreading the cells of an Excel spreadsheet. As a matter of fact, www.psychologytoday.com confirms that more than 90% of us will experience office boredom at some point. This can be true whether you own your own business or you work for someone else.
However, try to look beyond using social media and industrial amounts of caffeine to break up the tedium of office life. Loanable invites you to consider seven unorthodox ways to distract you from the slow march of the clock in the corner of your computer screen.
1) Create the Noir Cubicle Effect
Adding small lamps to your work space below eye level will bolster not only your mood, but also your powers of concentration. Go a step further by furnishing your lamps with red lampshades. This will make your cubicle feel like a cross between a vaudeville saloon bar and a 1980’s Cantonese restaurant.
This will surely constitute an improvement over whatever was there before. If necessary, petition the powers that be to replace any overhead strip lighting with adjustable spot lights. In this way, you and your colleagues will appear younger and more attractive.
2) Make One Attempt per Day at Something Audacious
We’re not talking in an Eat, Pray, Love or self-help manual kind of a way. What you should do instead is refine or devise a pitch, client initiative, or course of action. Whatever it is, make it bold, inventive, and focused on the bigger picture. Be prepared to fail and/or look foolish.
However, when you’re riveted to an engaging task, the adrenalin and endorphins will flow. Office boredom with disappear. The day will take shape, and the hands of the clock will spin round unnoticed.
3) Get Your Side Hustle on Behind Your Desk
As many media outlets, including BBC Business News, point out, having a job on the side is big business. First things first, though. You’ll need smarts for this to work if you don’t want to jeopardize your main source of income.
However, if you find yourself twiddling your thumbs at work, try stealthily turning your attention to the multitude of second-line business opportunities. Whether that’s selling wind chimes online or translating memos into Mandarin, you could find yourself earning from two jobs simultaneously. Talk about a way to beat office boredom!
RELATED ARTICLE: 6 TIPS TO STARTING A SUCCESSFUL AND LUCRATIVE SIDE HUSTLE
4) Be the Plant-Watering, Software-Installing Suck-Up
Make yourself the go-to guy or gal for some cherry-picked pursuits that don’t belong to anyone’s job description. This could mean watering orchids, walking the boss’s German shepherd, or spending hours obsessing over the ideal venue and seating plan for the office Christmas party.
Doing this will mean you will fill out your day and curry the favor of your superiors. This obsequious approach isn’t for everyone. However, it will distract you from office boredom. What’s more, it could lead to leniency, pay raises, and even promotion.
5) Exercise at Your Desk
Don’t be perturbed by the raised eyebrows of your colleagues. A thrice daily mini-routine of push-ups, squats, and pretend rope jumps will get your blood pumping. The ideas will flow, your health will improve, and you will alleviate some of your office boredom.
Moreover, if you work in a shared office space, you may be able to help organize—and even profit from—onsite exercise or activity classes. The possibilities are vast. They range from more conventional pursuits such as yoga to more uncommon ones such as still life drawing, pottery, and sculpture classes.
6) Send Office Boredom Running by Ripping up and Rewriting the Week
Try making Monday and Tuesday nights the new Friday and Saturday nights. Then, use the first two nights of the working week to check out those bands, bars, and restaurants you were saving for the weekend. This will make the working days at the start of the week fly by in anticipation of the evening.
Even better, the weekends will still be fun, even if you do little with them. That’s because they still carry their own inherent happiness. All of this means that suddenly the week is loaded, front and back, with things to look forward to. This will make your working and non-working week far more palatable.
7) Find Somewhere Unusual to Catch 40 Winks
There may well be an obscure office cupboard or attic space where you can catch up on some sleep while you’re ostensibly meeting with a client. Other destinations for a possible snooze are a steam room, sauna, or swimming pool lounger at a local gym.
Failing that, the nearly empty daytime movie theater is a good place to rest your weary eyes. And take heart from the fact that the days of more conventional rest will soon be upon us. As evidence, we offer http://www.podtime.co.uk/ and others, who are bringing their mini sleeping chambers to office spaces and bespoke hotels. Amen to that.
