How to Prevent Boredom from Arising Whilst Working from Home
Motivation can come externally from others, or internally from oneself.
When a person works from their home, there is usually nobody else around them to help them to maintain their on the job focus, or to stimulate their energy for what they are doing. At the office, the fellow workers provide a linkage into the common goals of what is trying to be achieved there, and the boss is always usually around to help you to focus properly on the job at hand.
At home, you are largely your own boss, motivation must come either from within, or from the connection to the task, in that you love what you are doing enough, enough to energise you into doing it.
Boredom is often a sign of lost motivation.
This is true especially if you are a person who tries to obtain motivation outwardly from your work, or from others. This means that when you need to produce this motivation with only your own internal driving force, and if you are feeling that this drive is not strong enough, or if it is not being valued enough in order to get you to follow it, you can quickly become bored with reaching out in that direction, and following that road, or embracing that position anymore.
Boredom does not have to be a negative emotion though. It does not need to prevent you from accomplishing your work/life goals at all, whether at home, or anywhere else for that matter.
When working from home, it is important to retain a balanced input of different types of energies. Working only from the one type of energy will quickly de-energise, and bore you. You can become stuck in the one mode of energy, and which is probably a negative one, if you are feeling bored.
If you are spending a lot of time seated in front of your computer, get up every so often to stretch your legs, and to walk around your house. Go outside and take a few deep breaths of fresh air, if it is a nice day. Make a phone call to someone, or other, to alter your mood from being inner directed to being outer directed. Turn on the radio, and get out of your own space and thoughts for a while.
Boredom can arise both from being distracted, or paradoxically sometimes even from a lack of distractions.
Boredom arises from distraction, because boredom is a form of distraction. It distracts you from pursuing the work goals that you should have set for yourself for your day's work at home.
When in the workplace, there are usually a number of other stimulating distractions that get you interested in them, and indirectly, they often will refocus you back onto your work task. You become aware of your distraction, and so you try to end it. The co-worker who walks past your desk, sits down on the edge of it, and starts talking about the recent sports event that has taken place in your city, for example, might sometimes be a welcome distraction. When this becomes a routine habitual thing though, it can annoy you, until you find a way of coping with this. This continued type of stimulation keeps you occupied in a way, and so this mind activity can help to prevent boredom from setting in.
At home, you can also have annoying interruptions, sometimes from one of the kids wanting something, or even from your wife wanting you to get up, and to cut the lawns. People do not seem to appreciate the fact that you are busy working, and they do not seem to value so much the position that you are in. They often will think that after all you are only working from home, and you can catch up with your work another time, because what they want you to do, they see as being more important. They will start to place a value on your time for you, perhaps not fully realising the value that your work places on your time.
When you are totally on your own at home, this is more when real boredom might strike you.
This is really the time when you should in fact be the most productive, but boredom has a way of removing the value of your work from your thinking. You do not find the energy or motivation to see anymore the value of what you are doing. You become bored or dissatisfied with it. Boredom is just a form of distraction here, just like the co workers, or the family members were creating for you, in the above examples.
If you can see that boredom is just a form of distraction or procrastination by becoming more aware of what is really going on here, you can often start to then conquer this feeling of boredom.
The great French philosopher and writer (1694- 1778), François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, known better as just Voltaire, once said this:
" Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need."
but then he probably never worked at home in the same way as we do these days, and after all he was also a writer. Writers are never bored, they always have something more to write. Writing is a drive that will even overcome boredom.
Take up writing in your spare time, and this might just be then more than just another tool that you can use to relieve this monotonous boredom that is eating away at your soul. Writing will place you back into contact with the very heart of your soul.
You need to dig deep and bring out the real you again to contact your purpose in life again. When you live from this inner purpose, you are almost never bored.
Boredom at its heart is simply a lack of love for what you are doing. Restore this love, and boredom will leave you, and trail somewhere far behind never to catch up to you again, because of the deeply inspired way of living that you are now living your life from, all because you are living from the real you now.
Boredom is a sign that you are not living the life you are meant to be living. You have stepped away from being your real inner self. You are living just as your outer self, and so boredom will always set in when you do this. When work is just work, it will be boring work. When work is your mission, you will never be bored.
There is an old story about three bricklayers who were building a new church for the town.
This story has been recreated by this author,here is a link to the more well known original version of this story.
A big city reporter came onto the site one day, and started interviewing these workers one by one.
He spoke to the first worker, and asked him what his job was like. The man stopped what he was doing, and grumbling an angry answer he said,
" I'm doing this very boring job of laying all of these hundreds of heavy bricks," he replied.
The newspaper man then walked over to another worker, who was cutting some bricks nearby with an angle grinder.
" What's your role here then, my good man?" he asked him.
" I'm new here." he said, " I'm just working here hard for a short while to earn some money, and then I will ditch this horrible job, and go back again to college, to finish my law degree."
The reporter then approached a third man, who seemed to be very happily busy and industrially working away, whistling cheerfully as he worked.
Once again the reporter asked this man what was his job here. This third man looked up with a twinkle in his eye, that looked as if it reached right down to his heart.
" I am helping to build a mighty cathedral here," he said. " It is one that will be a monumental work of art for this town, and I am making sure that it will remain so for many long years into the future."
Sometimes being bored simply arises from the attitude that we are carrying. Carry the right attitude along with you, and there will be never be any more room left in your luggage bag to carry any boredom along with you, you will have left all of your excess baggage now all far behind.
