Managing Downtime: A Practical Guide to Dealing with Office Hour Boredom

I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working…I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work. -Peter Gibbons, Office Space (1998)

Everyone has been there. If you understand the mission of this site, you may be there, trying to find a way out right now. Whether the job is boring or just not challenging, eight hours of your day, 40 hours of your week, 160 hours of your month, and 1920 hours of your year may be wasted because you’re ultimately unfulfilled at your work. These numbers may be exaggerations, as for some people, they may just go through periods of slow time or unproductivity due to the ebbs and flows of the nature of their work, while others just hit a rut. This is more so for those in the latter category as opposed to those for whom this is a constant reality, but even you are in the former, hopefully there is something here to make your days just a little brighter. This isn’t going to be a reiteration of the fish philosophy about just having a better attitude at work. Although that is the simplest way, and a prerequisite for approaching any unideal situation in life, this article assumes you know the importance of such. Instead, this whittles down to one piece of practical advice – connect what you like to do, to what you’re currently doing. This involves some creative thinking in that you need to find a connection to what you like doing within the context and confines of having office hours. For a student affairs professional, especially a residence life professional who has the opportunity to collaborate with any office on campus, all this takes is initiative.

For me, writing has become a great passion of mine. So I take the time to write about what I like and don’t like about what I do in the hopes that it resonates with others. So it’s not completely self-serving and taking away from honoring the position I have, some of that writing is research-based: reading articles from scholarly journals about student affairs practices and coming up with new ideas and theories that can be applied today. It’s being productive, even if it’s a bit outside of the purview of my job description, but one that can contribute to the department or field at large. The idea is productivity. For you, it could be dancing, cooking, singing, running or a myriad of other interests, but the point is – there’s something in life that excites you and gets you up. So focus on that, while you have to be there on the job. It could be starting an organization/office on campus, volunteering with a coach, or acting as a teaching assistant for a topic you really enjoy. You’re still interacting with students, which is the crux of any student affairs professional’s job, but it’s being done on your terms. Above all, it’s recognizing that there are ways to exercise control over what you do have control of, so don’t waste that power.

Defining Your Niche

Defining the career you want to pursue with your life can seem daunting and limiting. From a very young age, our parents, teachers, friends, and elders ask us the same mundane question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”.

The question is never “Who do you want to be?” or rarely “Where do you want to live?” or even more infrequently “How do you want to impact the world?”. We are expected to decide what we want to be before we even experience real life.

From children, to adolescents, to college graduates we are cradled by society’s comforting protective hands. The rules and regulations we are expected to abide by to maintain order is a small price to pay in exchange for meeting our basic survival needs and the comfort of life in the 21st century. We adapt to a way of life that shields us from raw adulthood. Up until the moment we graduate college, sign up for the military, and/or enter the workforce, we are gifted with a sense of freedom. It is not until we turn the ripe age of eighteen that our reality begins to change.

Eighteen is a milestone age in our nation. It is the age we are deemed adults and independent contributors to society. We are less protected from comforting hands and now must graduate from dreaming up our potential careers to actually living them. We are told to attend college, join the military, enter the workforce; to do something because that is what’s expected. It is the path into our twenties that becomes the defining decade of our professional course.

The pressure is real and unwavering. How are you supposed to know what you want to be when you grow up at age eighteen, twenty, twenty-five, or even thirty? How you feel here in this moment is no indicator of how you’re going to feel in twenty years. For this reason, and so many others, it is significant to your employment satisfaction that you choose wisely. You must define your niche now to ensure you won’t be disappointed or unfulfilled later.

Follow these five core ways to define your niche and navigate yourself to employment happiness:

1. Take a personality check. What type of person are you? Does giving back to the community by helping others invigorate you? Do you enjoy crunching numbers under time sensitive deadlines? Are you happiest in an isolated office space working alone or do you prefer collaborating in large groups? Understanding your personality will aid you in finding the ideal niche to share your talents, skills, and experiences.
2. Network. How are you supposed to successfully discover what you want to do for a career if you haven’t experienced the possibilities? Networking is a great tool to overcome this obstacle. You must direct your efforts to identifying the key players in industries and organizations you believe you identify with. Look to these figureheads for guidance. Do you agree with their professionalism? Is their work reflected in your own professional values and goals? Strategize to build meaningful partnerships in niches you believe you could work in someday.
3. Volunteer for your niche. Everything might seem perfect on paper, but before you sign employment contracts or accept a position it’s wise to really experience your decided niche. Explore the industry or organization that appeals to you. Do they offer internships or shadowing appointments? If so, seek those opportunities. Even a brief taste of the daily routine will give you a better idea of what’s to come than reading a summary of the job on paper or electronically. It’s your due diligence to explore before committing.
4. Remind yourself this is the “real world”. It’s challenging for some young professionals coming right out of college or grad school and entering the workforce. We have these illusions of what careers are like based on our school experiences, and most of us end up floored by the “real world”. You don’t work for a few hours and take the rest of the day off. There’s no schedule of five week vacations plus summers off anymore. You don’t get to call out sick every week and get away with it. Real work equals real responsibility and accountability for your actions. Consider this when defining your niche. If you can’t sit at a desk for eight hours a day, working in an office might not be your best match. If you’re the type of person who constantly needs to have variety in your day, working a strict routine of completing the same tasks day in and day out probably isn’t for you. These are important factors to consider when you begin defining your career niche.
5. Remember, you’re not stuck. Even if you think you’ve found your professional niche in your twenties or thirties, you aren’t trapped there until retirement. Our interests and goals change all the time. You might realize you want to teach or be a career coach during your youth and find out as time passes that you’d like to try working behind the scenes in administration or make changes on a political level for your organization. We aren’t ever immovable. That’s the beauty about work in our generation. There’s fluidity and we have ever-growing opportunities laid before us. Your niche may be one thing now, but could become another down the road. Don’t be hard on yourself or feel limited if you change paths. We all have the power to change our minds to redefine our niches.

Defining your niche is possible, but may take you some time. Even if you thought you had your whole life figured out, it could change paths right before your eyes. We are constantly moving, growing, changing, and adapting. Every age is a new milestone that brings with it new purpose and possibility. Defining your niche isn't as simple as telling your parents you want to be a doctor when you grow up. You might want that at age six, but discover you want to teach at age twenty-five. Life is unpredictable, but that's what makes it so fun! Be aggressive in your search, truly take action to find your niche, but allow yourself to enjoy the journey. Defining your niche comes from within and needs to be about discovering who you are at your core. We believe in you!

Grow in Dog Years

After many years of traveling, living abroad, and continually challenging myself to try new things, something I've realized is that, it’s not traveling that I truly enjoy; its personal growth that comes with getting outside of your comfort zone. Why? Because when we travel time becomes distorted. One day in a foreign country can forever change the way that you think about life. One week trekking through the amazon, or taking a road trip will often be more impressionable on you than a year in university. A few months working abroad can forever shape what you want out of your career and your life.

I believe that anytime someone puts themselves outside of their comfort zone, it leads to an accelerated hyper growth; what I now refer to as “growing in dog years”. In the same way that a dog theoretically ages 7 years in a year, I believe that when we travel, try new challenging things, and get outside of our comfort zones, we grow at a more rapid pace; we grow in “Dog Years”.

You see, when we get outside of our comfort zones and try new things, we realize that time is not created equally. When time is maximized, and we pack as many overwhelming experiences into a short period of time, we grow at an accelerated rate because, quite simply, we experience more. The more that you experience, the more that you grow.

This is why when we return home from our travels it is so hard to relate to our friends. So much has taken place for us in the last year, but for them their lives have remained essentially the same. They might have a new job, or a new girlfriend/boyfriend, but in reality their lives haven’t changed much throughout the course of that last year. They haven’t experienced the same intensity and acceleration of growth because quite simply, they haven’t experienced as much.

In my opinion, it is simply because you have grown more than they have in that same year. You have had more experiences. You have learned more things. You have widened your perspective in a way that they haven’t. So you are literally no longer at the same points in your life, you have accelerated your own growth and are now years ahead of where they are. In the same year that they grew only one year, you have grown probably 3-4x what they have.

Have you ever been in a position where you look back at the last 6 months and say to yourself, “I feel like the last six months have passed by in the snap of a finger, but at the same time so much has happened and it feels like an eternity ago!” This happens because you packed new experiences into your life, which made time pass by seemingly fast, but these experiences also accumulated at an insanely fast pace, making it seem like an eternity has passed. It’s quite the contradictory feeling.

I look at it like “hacking time”. If you want to get the most that you can out of your life, your goal should be to pack in as many new experiences as you possibly can into every year. If you look back on the last year of your life, how many new things did you try? How many impressionable events can you name? How many times did you take a new trip somewhere? How hard did you push yourself at work? How many new skills did you pick up? The more things you can list out, the more that you have grown.

Take something like Vipassana meditation for example. Although it might be a mere ten days long, in those ten days you will experience years of personal growth because it is such a novel and challenging experience. When you come out, you have grown more in the last ten days than your friends who didn’t do it with you.

Unfortunately, I also think that it’s necessary to touch on hardship, because hardship has a way of manipulating time, but in a bad way. Hardships and struggle have the potential to cause adverse growth. They have the ability to debilitate people and slow life down.

Hardships have a tendency to debilitate people. Something bad happens, and we sit in our rooms and sulk. We stop working. We stop moving forward. We stop growing. Months can pass in this way. Have you ever had a friend go through a failure and take months to get over it? Or a friend who broke up with a girlfriend/boyfriend and they take a year to get over it? Or, in the worst case scenario, the death of a family member? Situations like these have the ability to slow or entirely halt your growth, and it is important to be cognizant of this.

Hardships and struggle have the potential to either debilitate or motivate, and it is up to us with how we handle these hardships. We can either use them as an opportunity to grow, or a time to recess. Am I saying that if something bad happens ignore it and keep moving? Absolutely not. I am instead saying that with every struggle comes an opportunity for growth, and in the end it’s up to you how long you let that struggle knock you on your ass, or get back up and keep fighting.

Where positive experiences speed life up and cause one to say “time flies when you’re having fun”, negative experiences have the ability to slow life down and make it seem like it passes forever. Have you ever noticed that when you are in a bad mood the day seems to pass by incredibly slowly? Or remember back to those days of sitting in a classroom and staring at a clock waiting for time to pass, and then you go outside for recess and it feels like you didn’t get enough time to play? Funny how time becomes distorted depending on our mindset and how we are perceiving our experience of said time.

This is why it is so important to schedule things into your year that will have the maximum impact on your growth. This is why it is so important to choose a challenging career path, travel and work abroad when the opportunity arises, and jump at novel experiences every time you get the chance. It’s like the phrase “getting the best bang for your buck”, but instead I look at it as, “get the most shine for your time” ;) (ok ok I’m working on it!)

Time is not created equally. It’s up to you how you spend your time on this planet, and how fast or slow you want to grow. You have the ability to grow like everyone else, or grow in dog years. Personally, I choose to get the most out of every day that I am here on this planet and grow in dog years, and I encourage everyone else to do the same :)

See What Sticks: An Unconventional Partnership

Hi everyone, Amma Marfo here. Two quick things about me that you’ll need to know before we begin:(1) I am a reader. I am a library-loving, constant tome-carrying, unapologetic bibliophile. (2) If there’s anyone you will meet who can connect what she’s reading to the world around her, it’s me. As such, I want to dedicate my time in this space to sharing with you what I’m reading, and how it could inform a budding professional’s daily life.

Pat Sajak and Vanna White. Batman and Robin. Lucy and Ethel (sometimes). History and pop culture are littered with examples of powerful duos, hard at work to make the world better (or, in the case of Lucy and Ethel, more filled with chocolate). So often, we distill the stories behind creative excellence down to a moment of brilliance in one person (think Newton's revelation of gravity), or farm it out to a group through exercises like brainstorming. But Joshua Wolf Shenk's Power of Two splits the difference of those two long-held tenets, making the case for excellence as a pair.

He explores the accomplishments of collaborators like The Wright Brothers and the DaVinci brothers, comedy writers and producers Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles. Alternatively, he explores the power of rivalries as well, and how the relationship between competitors like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys brought out the best work in each. But in the most emotional part of the book, Shenk walks us through his final deadline for the very book we're reading...and the struggle he's having in the absence of such a powerful collaborative relationship.

I've been lucky enough to have a few people in my life that have given me the "power of two," each in a different season of my career. I can attest that there are projects I wouldn't have finished, ideas I would have doubted, and praise I would have shrugged away if not for the presence of strong, caring, and brilliant co-conspirators. The perspective of a dedicated partner can help you articulate your thoughts, can compassionately redirect you when you're feeling lost, and can cheer you on when your motivation is flagging. In the absence of that help from a trusted friend and second mind, some ideas would never take root. So my heart goes out to Shenk- writing a book about the power of creative relationships, all while searching for his own creative "other half."

As he chronicles his race to the deadline, he highlights a few strategies to create the kinds of partnerships that yield significant work:

Try.

Connection will not swoop down on you like a hawk seizing a mouse, and even if it does come toward you like a boat while you're floating in the ocean, you will still need to grab the rungs of the ladder and climb onto it, and the first step may not be the hardest, but it is, often, the wildest.

I love that Shenk follows this statement with, "find a stranger who gets you or a friend you think is strange." Sometimes, partnerships start when people realize they have a lot in common- these are the ones that are the easiest to cultivate. However, there's also tremendous benefit to working alongside people who are quite different from you. One of my most successful creative partnerships, with my friend and colleague from graduate school, came about because our personalities are different enough that we decided to present on it. Further, one of my current creative partnerships works well because my partner and I are each good at very different, but complementary, things. In both cases, each party took a leap to get involved- it's a little scary to put yourself out there to someone else- but it's often a risk that needs to be taken. As Shenk says, "To try is to risk succeeding."

Accept.

Accept that your partner is a pain in the ass. Accept that you are a pain in the ass, so the two of you are made for each other [...] Accept that the people you need will please you and disappoint you but that the index of the creative experience is not your pleasure or disappointment.

The premise of a partnership- be it platonic, romantic, or creative- isn't based in universal harmony. There are misunderstandings, fights, and even dissolution at points of struggle. But these moments are normal, even necessary, if meaningful work is to appear. Work with your partner to keep the work central, while at the same time being attentive to their emotional needs. Both are important, but they are separate, and each will take priority at different points of the ideation process.

Play Your Part.

The way out of the shackles isn't to find the key of to strain like the Hulk until they burst. The way out of the shackles is to stop believing in them. To play your part, do what you do best. To play your part, talk to someone. Talk to your partner.

We often take on projects or initiatives because we believe them to be important. And this is good, because this is how problems big and small get solved. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't enjoy the ride. Let play be a part of your creating process. Have fun. Some of the breakthroughs that have informed things like a new tool to solve a problem, an analogy to describe a concept, or even the structure of my first book, came when I took time away from the situation at hand to enjoy myself. It invites new perspective, and the distance required to look at our work objectively. Let your partner encourage you to play and create in new ways, you never know how it'll affect your final product!

All of this putting yourself out there, cultivating a relationship that supports the work, and making space to play to ensure solid creative work, will go a long way to help you create work you can be proud of. And when you do, Shenk advises you to keep the partnership going: "finish, or, at least, surrender. Give over the thing that you've both created and start the process over." The world needs what you and your partner have built- now get to the work of doing it all again.

A Quote for Comfort

I've got a few ideas for my debut post here on The Niche Movement. Thoughts about how to nail down what you want to do, about how your career path will most likely not be what you thought, about my personal career journey. But honestly, none of those are resonating with me right now -- and my best writing comes when my heart is locked in with the topic.

So today, I'd like to share a passage that's resonating with me right now. It's from The Law of Divine Compensation: On Work, Money, and Miracles by Marianne Williamson in a chapter titled "Job vs. Calling."

"If you're kind to people, if you're compassionate, if you pour your excellence into whatever you're doing, then you're doing the job God sent you to do. From that will emerge the next form that's needed to host the energies you're bringing forth."

Earlier on the page she says: "...our value, individually, is determined not by what we do but by the consciousness with which we do it."

What I love most about this post, and why it resonates with me right now, is the "from that will emerge" piece. Essentially it says that the next best way for you to use your gifts and talents will present itself to you. You don't have to push, you don't have to force it. You just have to trust that if you show up and use your gifts and talents wherever you are, the next right step will present itself to you.

I hope these passages provide you comfort, acknowledge that if you're doing good work in the world with intention, you're on the right track, even if you're not "there" yet.