So many friends and acquaintances over the years have found themselves in that crappy familiar spot: hating their job. Whether it’s because a gig wasn’t what you expected or you’re just burnt out on what you’re doing, I know the negative toll it can take when you hate the job you go to every single day.
In 2010, a week after graduating college, I got an offer from an ad agency for what I thought was my dream job.
It paid well. The agency was hip, creative, and known on a national scale. The people were incredibly intelligent, helpful and treated me with respect.
And after about a month, I freaking hated it.
I was overworked (the only Assistant Media Planner on not one but two accounts) with two bosses that were fighting for my time. My days quickly filled up with phone calls from eager media reps trying to weasel me into buying space with them, Excel formulas that were more complicated than my college calculus homework, and maintaining the exhausting appearance that planning a $250K ad budget as a 21-year-old by myself didnât scare me absolutely shitless.
None of that was the fault of the agency; they were running a business and all of those tasks are necessary to the operation. The fault was mine. I was young and naive and I thought that the place I was working was more important than my actual role. Boy was I wrong.
Whether we like it or not, our work takes up a pretty large chunk of our lives. So if you hate your job, it matters. If youâre in a position that doesnât utilize your best skills and doesnât speak to your values, it matters.
But this post isnât about how to stop hating your job or convince yourself it’s not that bad or even how to do work that makes you come alive. (We’ve got plenty of articles on this site about how to do that.)
This article is about what to do in the mean time until you figure out how to be doing work that makes you come alive.
Itâs about how to hate your job LESS by making strategic use of your time.
Back in 2010, there was a stretch where I came home every day and I cried. Not even because my days were that bad. Just because the dissonance between the life I was the living and the life I wanted to live was too much to bear. It weighed on me, and that weight manifested itself in my emotions.
I distinctly remember having a phone call with Jason one night after what seemed like an eternity of tearful calls night after night. He said to me, âYour situation is not going to change itself. Itâs up to you to make your days different.â
I realized that I had been waiting for someone or something to save me. I dreamed about a gallant knight from the creative department riding over to my desk on a white horse and saying âHop on mâlady. You donât belong here,â and then riding me back to the âfunâ part of the office. I fantasized about getting an email in the middle of the day from some amazing artist asking me to be their young protege (despite the fact that I had never really revealed to many people that I was even remotely creative. Whatever, they were just supposed to know, okay?)
I could have spent years (YEARS!) waiting for those things to happen. But instead I decided to do something about it.
If youâre there right now, please know that I understand what youâre feeling. You know you have a greater purpose inside you and it may feel like that inner spark will never see the light of day. But Iâm telling you right nowâŚ
It is completely within your control to get to a place where you’re doing work that you love.
But it doesnât happen by magic, and it doesât happen overnight.
Until you get there, here are three things you can do to avoid crying every day like I did.
What To Do When You Hate Your Job
1. Get specific about your exit strategy.
What you want to be doing instead of your current job? I mean what would really make you excited to get out of bed? Avoid broad sweeping titles like âI want to write about foodâ or âI want to work in fashionâ or âI would love to work for myself.â Instead try âI want to have my own food column for a major lifestyle websiteâ or âI want to become a retail buyer for XYZ storeâ or âI want to do freelance wedding invitation design full time.â
Getting specific will do two things for you. First, it will make it easier to come up with actionable steps to reach that goal. Second, it will give you something tangible and concrete to focus on while youâre in your current position. Youâll be amazed at how your attitude will change once you have a âlight at the end of the tunnel.â
Once you have a specific goal in mind, write down one thing that you can do right now to work toward that goal. Think about the skills or attributes that someone would need to get that position or start that business and then work backwards to discover how you can start cultivating that RIGHT NOW.
No one would probably hire you to write a food column if they didnât know you could write or cook. So focus your energy on starting a food blog. If you got an interview, you could point to that work as an example of your skills. No one would hire you as a buyer if you didnât know about current trends or the buying process, right? Devote one hour a day once you get home from work to reading up on buying and identifying trends so that you could speak intelligently on the subject.
These steps will help mitigate that feeling of helplessness you may be experiencing right now. The positive feelings you get from this intentional action and progress will spill over to your daily life and it will make your current situation feel less permanent.
2. Make this time mean something.
Like I said, most people are not in the position to walk into work one day and quit. So how can you make the time that youâre spending every day at your current job worth it?
Once again, working backwards can be especially helpful here. Think to yourself what your current company or role can offer you in terms of resources, skills, connections etc. that you might not have the opportunity to utilize after youâre gone.
Maybe you work with really smart, creative people. Make it a point to pick a few you look up to and ask them to lunch or drop by their office to ask questions and build a rapport. Those relationships you form could prove invaluable later on and your time will have been worth it. Or maybe you work for a company that has training seminars or classes â something you would not be able to have at your disposal at a smaller company. Take full advantage and learn all that you can to make your skill set more rounded.
Like I said, just knowing that your time in this position isnât being wasted will help you see your job more as a stepping stone and less as a sentence in purgatory.
3. Make a conscious effort to add joy to your day and remove negativity.
I know this seems obvious, but take a moment and think about your day. If youâre miserable, and especially if youâve been that way for a while, youâre probably just going through the motions. Showing up, grabbing your coffee or whatever your morning routine is, checking your email, showing up to meetings, doing your daily tasks, watching the clock tick down to the end of the day, and getting bummed out that itâs dark when you drive home. It gets easy to wallow in the suckiness, doesnât it?
But screw that. Youâre in control of the joy that you let in to your day and the joy you shut out. Do you have a song that pumps you up? (I highly recommend Whitneyâs âI Wanna Dance With Somebodyâ) Why not listen to it every single day before you open your inbox? Why not send a daily email to your project team with funny GIFs? Or every Wednesday take your lunch to a coffee shop and read an awesome book with not a single person bothering you. Whatever your thing is, make it conscious and purposeful.
If there are other coworkers that are unhappy with their jobs too, at all costs avoid the âbitching circle of doom.â This is when you get so comfortable with commiserating that itâs the only thing you talk about. If youâre constantly chatting with someone about all that sucks at your job, believe me, itâs only going to make you feel worse. When someone brings it up, acknowledge their feelings and gracefully change the subject, maybe even talk to them about what youâre working on from points 1 + 2 above. It will put you in a much better mental place to make the changes you need to make to get out of your situation, and to maintain sanity in the process.
Like I said, Iâve been there. Consider this post your gallant knight on a white horse. Iâm telling you you donât belong here. But itâs totally up to you to save yourself. You donât have to wake up every day and dread going to the office. You just have to put in the work to make your days different.
