Unhappy at Work? Tips for Making Your Working Day More Enjoyable and Fulfilling

Even great careers involve some tasks that suck. "Job crafting" can help us all gain the most fun and satisfaction from our working lives.

On my podcast The Happiness Lab, we’ve been tackling wellbeing questions submitted by our listeners. The first went to the heart of an issue that resonates with me deeply: work/life balance.

Q: “Are we born to work or are we born to live?” 

Listener Niki Walker 

In my last article, Cassie Holmes of UCLA Anderson School of Management explained that having as little as two hours per day of free time is enough to reach a happiness “sweet spot”.

But Cassie also warned that we shouldn’t assume every extra hour of leisure after that will increase our happiness – research suggests that more than five hours of free time each day begins to erode our sense of life satisfaction. 

“We don't want to feel so busy and productive that we don't have time to breathe or to notice,” Cassie says. “But we do want to feel like we're investing our time in ways that feel worthwhile.”

There are, of course, non-work activities which can give us a sense of fulfilment (volunteering, for example, or a hobby such as gardening or painting), but for many of us work remains a powerful source of life satisfaction.

That said, some of us actually spend many hours of the day doing things we neither enjoy nor find rewarding.

That's the premise of a question that a Happiness Lab listener named Megan sent in: 

Q: There are people who just can’t afford to do a job that they love, or they can’t monetize the things that they care about. How can someone like that go about enhancing their wellbeing in those eight hours a day in that position? I think they deserve to find happiness in the workplace, too. 

Realistically, no career is without its drawbacks and most jobs include at least some tasks we’d rather not do. But Cassie recommends improving our overall work satisfaction through a process called “job crafting”.

Job crafting is a term coined by my Yale colleague, Professor Amy Wrzesniewski. It involves identifying the parts of your job that you enjoy most (perhaps talking to customers, or training more junior co-workers) and making sure you perform those tasks as often as possible.

“You take the job that you have,” says Cassie. “And craft it so that you're more satisfied with the work at the day's end.”

There will always be some sucky duties that we hate and can’t avoid – but Cassie says there is a technique to “reframe” these despised tasks so that they feel more worthwhile. 

The process begins with asking yourself exactly what is it that you find enjoyable, rewarding or satisfying about your job. What’s your motivation?

“I’m a business school professor,” says Cassie. “What is that job? I conduct research. I teach. Why is that important? I want to create and disseminate knowledge. Why do I care about that? I want people to be smart. Why do I want people to be smart? I want people to be smart about their happiness and know how they should be spending their time to feel greater happiness.”

When Cassie is confronted with a dull or annoying task – going through her email inbox, for instance – she remembers that it’s a vital part of the core mission which really excites and satisfies her.

“So now it's not like I’m just responding to email. It's: ‘Oh, this is part of the endeavor to create knowledge about what makes people happy.’ So even email takes on new meaning.”

A final – and often overlooked component – of job crafting is the social aspect of work. Some of us spend more hours of the week with our co-workers than we do with friends, family or our partners. 

“In the time-tracking research, [we say] our happiest times of the day are when we are connecting with others and the least happy times are when we're at work, but there are potentially a lot of work hours that you could imbue with that authentic social connection.”

I certainly know people who feel uncomfortable making close friendships with work colleagues, or who would rather head home after their shift than attend an office meetup. 

Cassie points to research that prioritizing close workplace friendships might be a powerful way to improve your daily life. 

“In the Gallup poll, they have this funny question, which initially sounds like something a third grader would ask. ‘Do you have a best friend at work?’ Interestingly, the answer to that question is highly predictive of how engaged people feel at work; their performance at work; how satisfied they are with their work. And satisfaction with our work is a very big determinant of how satisfied we feel with our life overall, because we spend so much time at work.”

I love Cassie’s answer to Niki Walker’s great original question: “Are we born to work or are we born to live?” While the question seems to demand a binary answer – as you’ve seen – work can be integral part of a life well lived. The rather more nuanced truth is that whether working, resting or playing we need to be consciously trading our time for fulfilment. 

“The way we spend our time those hours, sum up our days, sum up our years, sum up our lives,” says Cassie. “Time is this resource that doesn't only signal how we're doing in life, it literally is our life.” 

So stay well, stay happy and spend your hours wisely,

Laurie

ps. If you want to read more about work/life balance and how to spend your time better, Cassie Holmes is also the author of Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.