
The Challenge vs. Skill diagram, showing the "Flow" region of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Model. Boredom is characterized by low challenge and moderate skill. That is, we're at risk of boredom when we're fairly competent at doing what must be done, and it presents little or no challenge. When many employees find themselves in this situation, the organization is at risk, both from voluntary terminations and from insufficient attention to benign but evolving situations that eventually become critical. Many authors have observed that a significant fraction of all business failures occur when top executives become bored. The diagram is by Oliver Beatson, and it's available at Wikipedia.
It seems clear to me that we're more likely to thrive when we're plugged into Reality. And I've noticed that some people who are bored at work are unaware that they are, because they find things to do that disguise the boredom, or at least make it more tolerable. For these people (a little tongue-in-cheek) I offer this list of boredom indicators.
- You can't sleep at night, so you sleep at work.
- You've figured out how to sit at your desk so that nobody can see that you're actually sleeping.
- You wonder if anyone heard that snore when you woke yourself up just now.
- On the way to the coffee machine you look down at your coffee cup and you notice that you already have coffee.
- You look forward to your bathroom break.
- You just arranged lunch with two people you can't stand, just to get out of the office.
- During lunch, you find yourself thinking about what to have for lunch tomorrow.
- You enjoy deleting sp*m.
- You read your sp*m.
- You send sp*m.
- You're usually current on your expense reports.
- You look forward to required training.
- It's all you can do to keep yourself from correcting obvious typos in Wikipedia.
- You correct obvious typos in Wikipedia, but you do it under an assumed name.
- No matter what you're doing, if it's work-related, you feel relief when you're interrupted.
- At work, you surf the Web looking for a new job.
- You do your Web errands (shopping, gifts, etc.) at work. No point wasting time at home on this stuff.
- You've learned the keyboard commands for quickly displaying the next or previous browser tab so you can switch quickly to a tab more suitable for work when someone suddenly enters your office.
- You listen carefully to the phone conversations of the person next door.
- You look at your boss's home in Google street view — again.
- You got pretty good at some of Google's more arcane commands by searching for your ancient love interests.
- You've figured out how to use the Internet All your paper clips are
pointing the same wayto spy on your dog sleeping on your sofa at home. - All your paper clips are pointing the same way.
- All your paper clips are pointing the same way except the ones that you intentionally turned around so that they wouldn't all be pointing the same way.
- You've discovered that your office is in a time warp, because the clock, while not actually stopped, is moving so slowly that it might as well be stopped.
- You send long email messages to colleagues debating the finer points of stuff that even you don't care about.
- You send email messages that are so long that if you were a recipient, you wouldn't read them.
- Under an assumed name, you hold the daytime North American record in an Internet computer game.
- When a random question comes into your head (like which tree species leafs out first in springtime) you immediately get onto the Web and find the answer.
- And the Number One Indicator That You Might Be Bored at Work: You've read all the way through this list to get to the number 1 indicator that you might be bored at work.
There's nothing magical about the number 30. I just stopped because I didn't want you to get bored. Top
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
There Is No Rumor Mill
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false, rumors can be so powerful that they sometimes produce the results they predict. How can we manage
organizational rumors?
Achieving Goals: Inspiring Passion and Action
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Indicators of Lock-In: II
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when others have concluded that the choice is folly. Here's Part II of a set of indicators of lock-in.
How to Get Out of Firefighting Mode: II
- We know we're in firefighting mode when a new urgent problem disrupts our work on another urgent problem,
and the new problem makes it impossible to use the solution we thought we had for some third problem
we were also working on. Here's Part II of a set of suggestions for getting out of firefighting mode.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Emotions at Work for more related articles.
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And on May 2: Narcissistic Behavior at Work: VII
- Narcissistic behavior at work prevents trusting relationships from developing. It also disrupts existing relationships, and generates toxic conflict. One class of behaviors that's especially threatening to relationships is disregard for the feelings of others. In this part of our series we examine the effects of that disregard. Available here and by RSS on May 2.
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