Your job doesn’t excite you anymore? Feeling stuck, tired, or overworked? Let’s face it, not every single part of your job will always be fun and inspirational.
This is especially true when you’re an office manager and you wear a lot of hats. But guess what? falling out of love with the job that used to thrill you is more common than you think.
It’s completely natural to feel underwhelmed sometimes— it just means you’re growing and you need new challenges. Instead of flying the coop and searching for a new job, take a moment and reevaluate how you can fall back in love with yours.
When your relationship with work is falling to the wayside, sometimes you just need a spruce up to help get things back on track. Whether you need to set brand new goals for you and your team or change your environment around to gain a new perspective, there are ways to help cure the feelings of emptiness and being overworked.
So what can you do to reinvigorate your passion? Try these 10 sure-fire ways to rekindle the romance with your workweek.
1. Alter Your Work Schedule
How long have you been working in the same environment? Spending so much time in one place that never changes can drive anyone nuts.
We get it, having a routine is important but it can eventually result in boredom. If you’re starting to feel overworked or you dislike your daily routine, go completely off the grid and use this time to reflect on your job and how to make it better.
You can start by using your lunch breaks or your off-duty hours to pursue non-work related activities instead of focusing all day on your responsibilities. Or would you be happier if you could hit the gym before starting your day or read twenty pages of a book between two tasks?
Whatever it is, remember that small breaks can provide a quick energizing mental boost. If you feel that you’re stuck sitting at your desk all day, take short walks to rejuvenate yourself.
Clearly, changing up your routine could be a helpful tactic in getting unstuck. Even if you only add an extra break in the afternoon to listen to your favorite playlist, or browse social media sites for inspirational stuff, it could go a long way to improve your productivity and help you fall back in love with your job!
2. Take Time To Recharge
Oftentimes the cause of unhappiness at work is getting burnt out. When your energy is low, your motivation withers away. Whenever you start doubting yourself, your career choices, the importance of your role, or worse, your abilities to lead your team, you must take a step back and give yourself some space and time to reevaluate the situation.
What happens when we try to do too much is that we deplete the energy that we have, meaning that we don’t have all that much to give. The key to building up those energy reserves is to spend the time you need to recharge. Whether that’s by going to the beach, camping, or as simple as taking regular breaks in your day.
Taking a much-needed vacation is one of the best responses to feeling overworked. You just need some real time off — no email checking, no communications with your team, no portfolio updating or any of that stuff.
Sometimes even a fun weekend away can do it for you if it’s the case of re-energizing your mind and soul. No matter what you do, you must allow yourself some me time to unwind and assure yourself you’re going in the right direction.
3. Level Up Your Responsibilities
Have you been working at your job for quite some time? Mastering your skills and responsibilities is important, but can reduce one’s enthusiasm for the work itself. Sometimes the work stops being fun because you could do it in your sleep. Maybe you’re bored at your job because you’re no longer feeling challenged–which is a human need.
We understand that doing the same mundane tasks every day can start to feel repetitive and soul-sucking. Creating different new tasks can really breathe new life into your work routine. So, try to see if you can add more to your workload or level up your responsibilities. Finding new challenges where you can personally grow might be exactly what you need.
A great way to energize your outlook is by stepping out of your comfort zone or taking some risks. For instance, try scoping out new responsibilities such as a new project or task outside of your regular workload.
Take it upon yourself to learn a new skill. Not only will that help inspire your passion, but your new skills can be a valuable asset to your job. By doing this, you’re also stepping away from repetitive tasks and projects and towards a more creative position.
4. Simplify Your Workload
On the flip side, you might be feeling overwhelmed with your workload. As you progress in your career, your job changes and you may not like all your different responsibilities. Consider renegotiating your job with your team to stop feeling overworked and to go back to doing more of the work that you enjoyed.
So if you dread going to work every day because of the overwhelming tasks, it’s about time you simplify your workload and start reassigning some of the tasks to your employees. Dividing work tasks among employees is an essential step in running your team– just give credit where credit is due.
Further, you don’t have to do all the thinking and shower all the stressors. You never know where the best ideas will come from, so you should encourage team members to voice their thoughts. Give employees many outlets for sharing their ideas. Not everyone likes to talk in meetings, so welcome people to share ideas via email or in one-on-ones with you.
By removing the reasons for your tiredness, you will eliminate its subsequent accumulation — your desire to do your job won’t run low anymore.
5. Set New Goals For Yourself
When you’re thinking so much about the performance of your team, it’s easy to lose passion for your job. You tend to lose focus on your own well-being that will result in tiredness.
If you are tired and overworked, you don’t think about the future; you don’t have the energy. If you are burnt out, you think that there is no future at all. For you, there’s nothing on the horizon– there’s only bleak and depressing ‘here and now’.
Doing the same thing day after day, year after year can become mundane. In order to overcome this, you, as a leader, have to constantly make new plans not only for your team but also for yourself. Mix it up by setting higher goals for yourself, or reaching into unexplored areas.
By doing so, you will change your own mindset — you will start to feel excited about the future. You will also feel a sense of accomplishment while learning new skills and realizing how much you can accomplish. This will help you stop feeling overworked, reduce your levels of anxiety, and let you work more proactively.
6. Make More Friends At Work
Sometimes it’s not only the work that helps make the day go by, but your employees and coworkers can also do that too. So if you feel that the love for your job is getting rusty, try to get to know your employees more. You never know what you might find!
Some say it’s lonely at the top. So take a moment to really get to know your coworkers during lunch and see if you guys have anything in common. You can also strengthen your work friendships by attending more company events and having a friendlier attitude.
Having valuable friendships in the office is a good way to find someone to bounce ideas off when you’re feeling stuck or need someone to talk to about work-related issues or being overworked. Always be aware of your employees, because one friendship can really turn your work environment around.
To give you the principles of building strong, lasting relationships with your coworkers, here’s our previous article about winning friends in your office.
7. Pursue Hobbies Outside Of Work
Always wanted to learn a new language or enroll in a martial arts class? Well, what are you waiting for?
Maintaining a high-performance work culture requires work-life balance. The best managers work to make sure that their teams stay engaged by encouraging time off and leading by example. All leaders need time to recharge.
Taking time off to rest and connect with your loved ones is important. But more than that, pursuing personal interests puts work into perspective and prevents the feeling of being overworked. So sign up for that lesson and start training. Perhaps you’ve never taken the time to create a bucket list, so now would be the moment to create one!
8. Revamp Your Workplace
Another great strategy to stimulate your stale mood is rearranging and redesigning your work area or even your entire office space. It can be an inviting, much-needed change every once in a while.
As you know, clearing off your desk and reorganizing your workplace can be cathartic. Whatever works for you and your team, optimizing your office can truly make a difference in not feeling overworked or tired.
Oftentimes, you have the tendency to associate the condition of your workspace with the condition of your work. So don’t let yourself fall out of love with your job over something as simple as a messy desk.
Surrounding yourself in an organized environment might ignite your creativity and help you feel more inspired to do your work again. Sometimes you just need a visual spruce up to help get things back on track.
9. Seek Out Passionate People
If your motivation is waning and you feel like you could quit on the spot, consider venturing out into the world and reaching out to passionate people in your industry.
If you can’t find it internally, then you can start exploring outside your organization. Whether it’s your colleague, someone from a professional networking group, or a fellow manager, surrounding yourself with energetic people who have clear and ambitious goals can help revive the sagging interest and inject renewed passion into your job.
At the end of the day, you might need someone you can vent to privately when work becomes unbearable. Seek a confidant or people who share the same sentiments as you.
Another way to renew the sense of your mission is to start mentoring more people. We know that our skills develop and deepen when we teach others. So this could be a decision that is helpful for everyone involved, most especially for you!
10. Create Opportunities To Reflect
At the end of each day or each project, evaluate how you feel about the way you spend your time. You probably won’t be exuberant and energized every single day. But if you never feel that way, or regularly feel frustrated and tired, you could take some time to reevaluate your job as an office manager.
Reflecting in this way will help you see patterns of likes and dislikes, which will help you navigate a maze of opportunities to find the kind of future you want for yourself. Remember that people never get tired out of nowhere. There’s always something that has caused you to fall out of love with your job.
Apart from that, the sense of fatigue tends to accumulate — if you feel overworked, you can’t just ‘refresh’ yourself by going on a vacation, without structural changes in your work process. So one of the first things you need to do is to get rid of any factors causing this accumulation of fatigue. If you don’t do this, nothing will restore your love for your job.
Lastly, ponder back to the time you got promoted or hired. Think back—what allured you to your current job in the beginning? Reflecting can help reminisce on goals and dreams that were once left behind or forgotten.
The best route is to reflect on the positives and realize your personal and career growth. Look how far you have come! Take a moment and be proud of your accomplishments. Positive thinking is key. Thus, love what you do and how you choose to do it.
Final Thoughts
Even the best job can get old after a while. Even the most passionate people in the world have bad days or feel overworked…and one of the most common reasons why people fall out of love with their job is that they stop doing what they love.
The moment you start dreading going to work or daydreaming about clocking out at the end of the day, do a quick self-audit of all the responsibilities that your role entails, noting down everything you enjoy and everything that makes your day a trip to hell.
Once you figure out what tasks or responsibilities are causing your dissatisfaction, try to eliminate them from your workday and add more of what you enjoy.
Most importantly, work hard and improve your skills as a manager. The satisfaction and fulfillment of your team will give you the motivation to keep working hard. And one day, you will wake up feeling incredibly fulfilled–because you’re doing great work, work you’ve grown to love!
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