Burned Out and Bored at Work: Using Job Crafting to Increase Your Career Satisfaction
Beat boredom and burnout with
Job Crafting
Are you feeling burned out and bored at work? Overstimulated and understimulated? Exhausted, yet wanting more?
You're not crazy. And you're not alone.
Boredom and burnout have more in common than you might think.
The Intermingled Roots of Boredom and Burnout: The Importance of Engagement
Whether you're exhausted or bored at work, your career wellness is at risk.
Your level of work engagement plays a significant role in whether you feel "bored out" or burned out.
Feeling engaged in work is crucial for your work satisfaction. It's what helps you bring eagerness and enthusiasm to your role. Work engagement also drives a sense of ownership in your actions and commitment to your colleagues and those you serve. It encourages you to seek new challenges and growth.
Take engagement away, and what are you left with?
In the case of boredom, your daily tasks become tedious and monotonous. The minutes, hours, and days pass like a flat, bland landscape. There's no challenge or novelty to keep you interested.
When seen through the lens of burnout, loss of work engagement feels like a massive energy drain. Overstimulation and overwork spin you into a stress state.
Regardless of how we get there, loss of engagement from boredom and burnout shows up in remarkably similar ways.
Whether your mind is under-stimulated and wandering or overwhelmed and pushed beyond capacity, you're at risk for increased errors, procrastination, and reduced productivity.
Feeling that you're wasting your time and training on menial tasks can be just as draining and disheartening as feeling that you're not performing your best because you don't have the time or mental bandwidth to focus. Both can lead to indifference and detachment.
When you've reached the "what's the point" stage, either by way of "what I'm doing doesn't matter" or "no matter how hard I try, it's not enough," your sense of purpose is lost and cynicism creeps in.
“Bored out” and burned out are two sides of the work engagement coin. When unattended, boredom can contribute to burnout.
No matter where you land, I want to help you find new ways to engage and improve your career wellness and satisfaction.
Job Crafting to Increase Engagement When You're Burned Out and Bored at Work
What's job crafting?
It's a creative way to transform your healthcare role by actively and intentionally aligning your activities with your strengths, needs, and interests. Instead of waiting for someone else to fix the problem, job crafting lets you shift your role and create a greater sense of autonomy and satisfaction in your healthcare career.
When you start noticing that you've become bored at work, you can use job crafting to proactively shape a new, unique-to-you version of your job description. The focus of job crafting is enhancing your well-being.
Initially defined in 2001 by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, job crafting is motivated by three essential needs of individuals: having some degree of control over your job, feeling good about your work (creating a positive self-image), and making meaningful connections.
To do this, Wrzesniewski and Dutton observed three areas that were important for effective job crafting:
Changing task boundaries (changing the types or number of job tasks)
Changing cognitive task boundaries (changing how you view your work)
Changing relational boundaries (changing who you interact with and/ or how)
For introverts in healthcare, this means you can use small, personalized tweaks in how you approach your work to help shift away from boredom and burnout.
How Introverted Healthcare Professionals Can Put Job Crafting into Action
I'm a fan of using small steps over time to create big shifts in your experience. Job crafting is the perfect opportunity to put that philosophy into action.
Even better, job crafting can be an effective tool for increasing work satisfaction for all members of the healthcare team. In fact, the original paper describing job crafting was inspired by research on how hospital cleaners approached their work.
Remember, a guiding premise of job crafting when you're burned out and bored at work is that you're choosing to proactively seek ways to change your experience.
As you consider ways to mold your role, pay attention to which activities can increase or decrease your time and energy demands. If you're already exhausted, consider ways to lighten the load. If you're bored at work, seek stimulating options that feed your need for growth and expansion.
Now, let's drill down and get specific about how introverts in healthcare can use job crafting to increase the likelihood that they're engaged in work that's invigorating without being oppressive.
Task Crafting: Molding Your Day-to-Day Activities
Consider the tasks you're regularly required to perform for your role. How can you adjust the type, frequency, or degree of those tasks to best suit your strengths? Where can you streamline or decrease duties that are monotonous and draining?
Examples:
A nurse interested in technology masters her facility's electronic health record to find shortcuts and hidden functions that increase the speed, ease, and efficiency of her clinical documentation.
By initiating a project to raise awareness and educate patients on the importance of preventive care, a nurse practitioner taps into her love of teaching.
An experienced physician increases his intellectual stimulation and ability to take on more challenging cases by delegating less complex cases to junior colleagues.
A physical therapist who loves sports and enjoys treating athletes takes on those patients from colleagues who are less enthused by that particular treatment focus.
Relational Crafting: Transforming Workplace Connections
Positive relationships and connections are essential for life and career satisfaction. This aspect of job crafting concerns the "who" of your work. When you're bored at work, how can you seek out novelty and adventure through new or deepened connections? Who can you turn to for support or camaraderie when you're feeling burned out?
Examples:
A physician assistant seeking greater challenges nurtures a more profound, collaborative relationship with a specialist whose work interests him.
By initiating quick staff huddles at the beginning of each day, a physician increases the effectiveness of her team and fosters a sense of togetherness and ownership for all involved.
A nurse finds greater humanity and meaning in his work by getting to know his patients beyond their medical condition.
A healthcare administrator drained by constant interruptions, meetings, and phone calls elects to start using detailed written updates when appropriate so she can decrease the need for face-to-face communication.
Cognitive Crafting: Changing How You Think About Your Work
Though I certainly don't advocate denying or ignoring your challenges, it's important to recognize that the thoughts you use to frame your experience impact whether you feel engaged in work that is rewarding. Your thoughts are powerful. Use them for your own good.
Examples:
Instead of feeling frustrated by the monotony and repetition, a physician uses routine visits as a chance to holistically care for his patients and help them be proactive in their health.
A physical therapist celebrates the incremental improvements she's helped her patients gain and sees how she's impacting their quality of life.
By being gentle and reassuring, a phlebotomist sees how he can help decrease patients' fears of medical procedures.
A hospital cleaner sees herself as a healer by keeping exam rooms clean and decreasing patients' risk of infection. (This is one of the examples that inspired job crafting!)
These are a few ideas to help you start thinking about how you might shift from burned out and bored at work to pleasantly surprised that the job you'd almost given up on can be rewarding again.
Job Crafting Works for Introverts in Healthcare
As an introvert and healthcare professional, you were likely drawn to the medical field for a variety of reasons. You may have felt the promise of deep connections and an opportunity to meaningfully impact others' lives. You were also likely attracted to the potential of continuous learning and being intellectually challenged.
The possibility of being bored at work likely never crossed your mind. It may also feel confusing if you simultaneously feel overworked, pressed for time, and out of control.
When you tune in to your strengths, energy levels, and interests, you can open yourself to seeing all the subtle ways you can start modifying how you perform your role.
Get curious. Make it a game. How many ways can you find to adjust your tasks, relationships, and mindset when it comes to your healthcare role?
Boredom and burnout don’t have to be your story.
I’d love to hear your successes. Shoot me a note here.
Do you need more tips on how to invite curiosity and play into your life?
Create calm in the middle of your busy day with my free Mindful Minutes Toolkit.
You can access it for free here.
Ready for 1:1 support from someone who understands your introverted nature?
Learn more about working with me here.
Charity is a physician and burnout coach helping introverts in healthcare escape feelings of apathy, irritability, and resentment brought on by the increasing demands and decreasing rewards of medicine.
She uses her 20 years of experience in clinical medicine combined with coaching to help introverts discover ways to be diligent, thoughtful clinicians while prioritizing their needs and protecting their energy. She wants you to know you don’t have to feel guilty for wanting a thriving life inside and outside of medicine.