Ever find yourself mindlessly working your way through tasks and activities without engaging and thinking about them? If so you might be sleep working…
5 signs to spot sleep working:
Not being excited by your work
Feelings of dread
No curiosity/creativity in your work
Feeling you’re doing the same thing every day
Unengaged
Without realising it, many of us spend much of our working day on auto pilot, not engaged in what we are doing, or why we are doing it.
Many of us will open our laptops or fire up our desktops and begin to scan through emails and before we know it’s lunch time and we have no record of half of the day.
We often give very little thought to how or what we want to achieve on a daily basis and just drift through our tasks.
Sleep working gives us less control over our day and makes us feel like someone else is in charge. Research uncovered that we spend over 84,000 hours at work during our lifetime [1]. That is a 1/3 of our waking hours during adulthood… unengaged and robotic almost.
Waking up your work
We wanted to share with you some tips to stop sleep working and start living! Work doesn’t have to be boring, it can be fun, energising and uplifting, we just need the right mindset and tips to do it.
1. Deliberately experiment
Experiment with elements of your job.
Try something different.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that shaking up the way we work can have positive outcomes. Change and adapt the methods that aren’t working for you and that are draining your energy. For example, if you dread the idea of sorting through emails at the end of the day, can you switch this task to first thing in the morning?
Can you grow or promote the elements you love doing and try and reduce or improve the elements that you don’t enjoy doing as much? We have a mapping exercise which enables you to reflect on, and see the interplay between your tasks and your energy load. The exercise is called love and loathe.
Think back to a time you felt energised by your work?
What were you doing?
Who were you working with?
What time of day was it?
Take into consideration all of these factors and try to adjust your working style to align with your individual needs.
2. Think about the why of work
We spend a lot of time doing work, without actually thinking about why we do it. Arguably, the why of work is the most important element yet it’s the least talked about. But why is the why missing from our current discussions at work?
Research has found that 8/10 people were willing to earn less money to do more meaningful work [2]. Meaning in our work gives us value, fulfilment and purpose. So it’s important to connect and engage with this.
Some questions to consider to engage with the purpose and value of the work we do are:
Why does my job exist?
Who benefits from the work I do?
How can I see and hear about the impact of the work I do?
You can read more about connecting to the meaning and purpose of your work here.
3. Use your strengths / find a way to tap into your passions at work.
A scientifically proven way to use your strengths at work is job crafting. People who used strengths at work are 6x more likely to be engaged at work [3]. Job crafting is an approach that enables individuals and teams to actively shape and tailor their work around their passions, strengths and interests.
It enables people to personalise their work in order to boost engagement and to make people feel happier in the work that they do.
In order to create a more personalised approach to our work, individuals need to be more deliberate in the way they approach and carry out their tasks and responsibilities. Hence the importance of the the 3 tips we have provided you with in this blog.
To explore more around personalisation at work watch this epic ted talk.
Also, you can find out more about using your strengths at work and job crafting here.
Thanks for reading, we hoped you enjoyed this blog as much as we liked writing it.
Any questions, queries or just fancy a chat then please get in touch.
References
[2] https://hbr.org/2018/11/9-out-of-10-people-are-willing-to-earn-less-money-to-do-more-meaningful-work
[3] Rigoni, B and Asplund, G (2016) Developing employees’ strengths boosts sales, profit and engagement, Harvard Business Review, 1 September, available at: https://hbr.org/2016/09/developing-employees-strengths-boosts-sales-profit-and-engagement (archived at https://perma.cc/P284-TEXB)
