What do you do when your job becomes repetitive and monotonous? Here are some things that I do to remain engaged, excited, focused and productive (hopefully at least some of them work for you):

  1. Know the purpose. What’s the purpose of the business? Think about the value the company is providing and the people it’s helping. See how your actions contribute to that purpose. Your contribution may be comparativelly small, but still important.

  2. Get curious. Try to notice and understand things beyond your job and your responsibilities. Also try to better understand the processes, tools and people on your team.

  3. Challenge yourself. You can challenge yourself by trying to put in additional effort. You could try to be more creative, by coming up with more ideas than usual, or simply decide to focus and cross off as many items on your todo list as you can. I did that today and I can tell you that it feels really good to accomplish that much work.

  4. Adjust the working environment if you can. Know your own personality and what makes you productive. For example, if you’re an introvert, you probably won’t like meetings too much, so try to minimize them by trying to communicate using other forms of communication first. On the other hand, if you’re an extrovert, you will probably get bored working in isolation, so see if you can handle people tasks, such as coordinating, communicating, and helping new team members get up to speed if those things are going to energize you.

  5. Notice ongoing problems and fix them. Pay attention to inefficiencies that make your job unnecessarily harder, and suggest/implement a solution. This may or may not require other people to change their behavior. If it does, make sure you clearly communicate your reasoning to them because they might get defensive and resist the change. If they agree, be patient - habits take a long time to change.

  6. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Criticizing yourself may work in the short term, but that approach is not sustainable. Beating yourself up will make you less creative and less open to new ideas. Instead, what I do is focus on some positive aspect of the job and let that inspire me.