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Set aside work/career for now. What do you do in your personal life? Have you had any experience with celebrating small (even tiny) milestones or "achievements?
by strgcmc 4y ago
Set aside work/career for now. What do you do in your personal life? Have you had any experience with celebrating small (even tiny) milestones or "achievements?
Recent example: I recently moved house. Many of my books and lower-urgency work resources are still in moving boxes. I think I need a new bookshelf, so that I can unbox some stuff. I take pleasure in the act of putting together the bookshelf. It is a 30-60min task, it is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I feel accomplished about doing this proactive step to improve my working environment. Plus I like the new shelf I picked, I like the way it looks, the design itself gives me some small amount of pleasure.
Rinse and repeat. Maybe not every day, but every week, there will be some small/tiny/insignificant victory like this. Learning to appreciate them, will not necessarily bring you lifelong joy or self-actualization on its own, but it will do wonders for improving your relationship and emotional balance with respect to work. Sometimes a big project goes wrong, everything is on fire, my boss is asking me to do some crazy unreasonable thing (but at least, a good boss doesn't ask this unnecessarily, and only very rarely), whatever... but still there are always some minor victories to celebrate, or at least partial progress:
- hey I stopped the bleeding on that production outage -- at least other teams know where to look for deeper fix
- hey I sketched out an outline for that documentation that everyone keeps asking about -- even if the content isn't there, at least people know this is where new content should go
- hey I wrote down all my tasks for tomorrow -- so even though I didn't finish things today, I can still log off and forget about them, then pick them up again in the morning
EDIT: Or, to put it another way:
- don't think about the problem as, "how do I learn to accept tedium or chores, and not get bored/frustrated/angry about them?"
- instead the problem should be, "how do I find contentment in the small details of life, that I previously overlooked as simply being tedious or boring?"