Do you have a feeling of dread every morning when you wake up? “I hate my job,” you repeat to yourself as you hit the snooze button.
Again.
Getting out of bed seems like a monumental task, and it’s just the start of the day.
Next is the commute in traffic. Once you arrive, the stale coffee because your company is too cheap to buy good stuff. The Friday donuts shoved in your face every week, just begging you to be eaten and unable to render yourself to move out of your terrible office chair?
Oh, and the completely ridiculous politically correct culture that now plagues every office park in America. Where saying the tiniest thing wrong will result in you getting fired, a termination of your 401k, and for good measure it’ll be an old cranky HR lady with a vendetta against you.
Do you suffer from this?
Well, my friend–it seems you have come down with a case of I Hate My Job.
“I HATE MY JOB” — WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT!
A GUIDE TO MAKING THE MOST OF HATING YOUR JOB
Let’s face it, if you’re reading this post it means that you probably have some higher aspirations. Those who do not have those aspirations are spending their office time watching cat videos on YouTube, not reading and improving.
So consider yourself a bit ahead of the curve.
You’ve accepted the fact that you have a Miserable Office Job and are trying to make the most out of it whilst simultaneously moving towards something better. Great!
The major problem is that too many people fall into a woe-is-me cycle at their job. I’d know, because I’ve done it before. It starts on the first day when you’re new on the job. Brimming with excitement.
“This is the place I make a name for myself!”, you exclaim while pushing the doubts out of your mind.
We know what comes next. The first few weeks, maybe even months–aren’t so bad. It’s tolerable. People are friendly to you. You’re doing something new. Excitement!
Then that slowly (or quickly becomes)…I HATE MY JOB.
Usually for me, around the sixth month mark was where it started going downhill. I’d get fed up of something my boss was doing, tired of the boss above him, or the coffee made me want to vomit.
No matter at what point in the relationship this happens to you, rest assured that once it starts it rarely recovers. The Great-Now-Miserable Office Job becomes a little nag in the back of your head. Much like a relationship where someone cheats on the other, there’s always something in the background.
It will never full recover.
So, once you reach that point where you’re screaming to yourself, “I hate my job!”…here’s how you make the most of it.
#1: GET A STANDING DESK
It seems so simple, but the fact of the matter is that we’re not meant to sit all day. It’s terrible for our posture, health, and overall mood. Add in the fluorescent cubicle lights and you have a recipe for disaster.
A standing desk will at least get you out of that same position and give you a slight sense of renewed energy at times throughout the day.
The best situation is to get a standing desk that can be raised and lowered. It’s not great to stand the entire day either–so mix it up. Sit for half an hour, stand for an hour. Rinse and repeat.
Now, standing desks can be expensive–which is why you should do your best to put the onus on your company (who is making you miserable) to do so. Many companies have someone who is an “ergonomic specialist”–that’s their whole job. To help you.
The reality is that it’s probably just someone from Human Resources to handle this so you don’t sue the company for arthritis, but if you can truly prove you are having problems from sitting all day, the company will probably do their best to hush you up.
This means getting a standing desk!
Step 1: See if you have a HR person/ergonomic desk specialist at your company. Send them an email and tell them you’re interested in a standing desk situation.
Step 2: When they respond, they’ll probably have some questions about what’s ailing you. Ailments are so common from sitting all day, you don’t even have to try to make something up. Just say you have back or neck pain. Simple as that.
Step 3: You may need to go to the doctor and get a note before the company shells out the money to help you do this. The good companies will just do it on demand (I had one of those), the bad companies make you jump through hoops (also had one of those).
Step 4: If you have to go to the doctor, simply say your back and neck are bothering you from sitting all day. The great thing about this kind of ailment is that there’s no way to prove it! The doctors are pretty used to this by now and will probably just write you the note and send you on your way.
Step 5: Take said note back to the assholes of wonderful HR people and shove it in their face give them the diagnosis. They’ll probably still have paperwork for you to fill out, and then they’ll order you the desk.
Step 6: Enjoy your new standing desk! Consider investing in a padded mat to stand on to keep the load off your feet. Depending on your dress code, you may also consider simply wearing a pair of comfortable shoes.
#2: LEARN TO JUST LET GO
Seriously, you’re going to hear all sorts of silly shit in the office. If you let everything get to you, you’ll make your office job even more miserable than it already is.
As an unplugged and enlightened person, the amount of cuckholdry you’ll hear in the office will astound you. Guys taking orders from their fat wife who sits on the couch watching Housewives all day. Meanwhile, the man is responsible for transiting the kids to school, cooking meals, and more.
If you try to argue with these people about the ways of life–it’s going to fall onto deaf ears.
It is not your goal to save every man out there.
Do not even try. That energy is far better spent simply working on yourself, speaking of…
#3: START YOUR OWN SIDE PROJECTS
I had the idea for this post for a while, and wanted to find a keyword to tag it with to rank in Google.
Running through my results, I found that a lot of people are using keywords like this because they despise their work. Here’s the proof.
The crazy thing is that you could easily do this kind of keyword research while at your desk.
Simply typing things into Google, seeing what comes up, and analyzing the competition. You could do all the nitty-gritty keyword research behind your business from the comfort of your new standing desk.
And trust me, the keyword and technical stuff is the least fun part of blogging and running an online business.
Why is this possible?
Here’s the real deal about “employee time”.
Most people in the workforce work for eight hours a day. But that working time consists primarily of goofing off and trying to look busy.
In my case, I was spending probably 95% of my day doing that.
Most people it’s probably in the 70% range.
So, if you think you can get away with it…find something to work on.
Take a look at the little book I wrote recently, Understanding Ukraine. I launched it at 99 cents in order to climb up the Amazon rankings. It became a “best-seller” almost overnight, because it was a tiny niche.
Even at a raised price of $4.99, it’s within reason to sell 20 a month. That’s not a huge amount of titles. That’s nearly $70 in my pocket (after Amazon’s fees).
You’re telling me you couldn’t jot down a thousand words a day while you’re at your desk with nothing to do?
That entire book is only 16,000 words and is pretty much my entire niche site copied over into an eBook format. It’s an easily repeatable format.
Write 1,000 words a day at your desk (more coming below on HOW to do that). That’s one blog post.
Build your own website and start publishing them. Learn about keywords, AdWords, and other things that go into running a website.
When you reach 20 posts (1,000 words each), copy and paste them into an eBook. You could do this kind of formatting at your office job, easily. Learn to format for Kindle, then publish. Then you get to learn about marketing, and how Amazon’s formula works.
1,000 words a day. That’s not hard. It shouldn’t take you more than an hour. Considering you’re probably wasting at least five hours a day already, what’s the harm?
If you managed to pull that off, you’d write roughly the equivalent to Understanding Ukraine in just two weeks. Two weeks to write the first draft of a book–and you’d be on your way to becoming an Amazon best seller (obvious sarcasm)
IMPORTANT: Your employer can see everything you do on your computer. Doesn’t mean they will, but they can. Source: I was a Senior IT engineer.
Pro tip: Use GMAIL to write your drafts. An IT person will rarely spy on you just for shits and giggles. It’s when you start doing suspicious things like writing a blog on WordPress that things will start to look bad. Most people leave their Gmail inboxes open on their computers all day.
Just load a small pop-out window and write your drafts in Gmail.
Entirely deniable.
THE “I HATE MY JOB” FINAL STEP
Eventually–you quit.
Okay, a bit extreme. Don’t do it that fast. Maybe you really have no desire to live abroad. Or hell, to start and run your own business. Maybe you just want to hate your job a little less.
My new life in Prague is fantastic–I work for myself and get to have views like this whenever I want.Regardless of whether or not you have aspirations to break all the way free, implementing these steps into your office job will make you happier.
Being able to stand and stretch will improve your posture, mood, and fitness level. Learning to let things go will help you become more zen and at peace with yourself. And working on your own side projects will give you a sense of satisfaction, and will hopefully even make you a few bucks.
Stop saying, “I hate my job.”
You can be miserable, or start making it less miserable.
The choice is yours.
‘Til next time,
Kyle
PS: If you feel like you’re at a point where you want to start your own site (or just improve the look of your current one), I offer free consultations.
Kyle asked if I had any thoughts to add, so here goes.
As someone who had a nervous breakdown in his first job out of college because the thoughts of getting into the car and driving to the office made me want to curl into the fetal position, I have experience with this. Even with my own company there have been times when I have hated it, so here’s how to get through this.
First thing is to step back and really analyze what you hate about your job. You co-workers? Your boss? The office culture? Or the actual work that you do? I’d recommend just sitting down with pen and paper and letting your angst flow. Once you have a better understanding of your grievances, you can work on addressing them. We need specificity to create solutions that will have an impact.
I think the solutions to some of the above are obvious. Love what you do but hate your boss? Apply elsewhere, etc.
If your gripe is you dislike WHAT you are doing, then we are going to have to take some steps. A lot of people are scared to make change because of the fear of the unknown. So, thought exercise: Let’s you hate your job, and you quit tomorrow. What is the ABSOLUTE WORST CASE scenario. Write that down. I am talking car re-possessed, evicted, sleeping on a friend’s couch while living off ramen, etc. Now that that’s outta the way, solve the aforementioned dilemmas, I’ll leave that exercise to you without guidance, get those creative juices flowing.
Ok, back on track. You hate your job, you want out. Ideally a freedom self-employed type thing most people dream of. Time to get ruthless. This is gonna suck for some of you. To get a side gig truly going, we need some sacrifice. The problem most ppl have is they hate their job, but they are making decent money to do enjoyable things outside of the job. So its a means to the end situation, you put up with it while working for the weekend. Well that just ended. You are no longer buying vanity shit. No longer going to the bars Friday and Saturday night to drink hard enough to forget the pain that awaits you on Monday. You have to EARN fun time back.
You are gonna create a plan on making side income. I don’t give 2 fucks how or what this looks like. We all have different skills and interests, so it’ll be different for each of us.
Your are going to set milestones in this plan. And at each milestone you are giving yourself a reward. The bigger the milestone, the bigger the reward if you want. Don’t care. Motivate yourself a bit harder.
This plan has a fucking due date. X by when, Y by when, etc. “I’ll do more work tomorrow” or “I’ll get to it later” might cut it at your shit job, not here.
If you miss a deadline, you gotta forfeit something. Reduce the next reward, punch yourself in the face, fuck if I know. It just has to suck a little. You need consequences for being a lazy bitch.
Do this once, and you have created skills you can replicate. Maybe your first attempt bombs. Tough shit, 3 out of 5 small business in America go broke in 2 years. Deal with it. What did you learn? How can you do it better? What mistakes will you avoid next time?
So there you go. You lose the right to complain if you don’t do anything about it. And how many people do you know that bitch about their jobs, but spend their money on materials items and booze to ease the pain without doing anything to change their circumstances? Don’t be those guys.
Goddamn dude, this was gold. When are you starting your blog again? You could copy and paste all your comments here and you’d have a pretty good start right off the bat.
That’s the biggest thing! Too many people are working for the weekend. I did this for a while too. Frankly, jumping in headfirst to moving abroad and just DOING it was the BEST thing I ever could have done. No comparison. I almost wish I hadn’t been making as much money as I was—would have been easier to quit. Not as much fun money.
This warrants a post on it’s own.
Yup, complacency and distractions. Society has inundated us to believe that we need to buy things to make us happy, or self-medicate (hello bars every Friday / Saturday) to ease the pain. Honestly, even aggressively chasing girls is just another way to make life bearable before Monday morning.
We put up with our shitty jobs, cos it enables us to do these “fun” things. It’s a trap that is hard to avoid unless you honestly came from shit. Poor, broke, lower class, whatever. If that was your background you have a fire, a drive, to never go back there. Most of us raised in at least middle class never quite know what that is like, so the trap is easier for us to fall into.
Well…is it society or is it REALLY that miserable?
I mean, it’s EVERYONE that does this. Yep, agreed on the trap thing though. At the same time…what can you do besides just break out.
a minimalistic lifestyle goes a long way to making you realize how much stuff you actually need. Every few months I also do a “buying freeze” where I only buy the necessities. No more “wants” or “nice to haves” no matter how awesome the deal might be. Makes you realize how much money you spend on dumb shit.
Another super weird tip, move into a smaller place. The more rooms/space you have, the more stuff you need to make it feel not empty (cos let’s be honest, nobody wants an empty room).
Yep, exactly how I feel when I moved abroad.
Except now I’m in a 2 bedroom and I do have a bigger want to buy more shit. More space.
I think there is a balance. Having a 2 bed apartment means an office space. Potential payoff.
A 4 room house for a single guy? Overkill!
don’t you dare, lol. Tempted to expand on this topic myself. It is near and dear to my heart.
This is golden.
It really is. I’m gonna have to write a whole response in a post.
appreciate it!
Would you say Google drive is a safe bet for getting blog work done on company time? They would need to know my google password to see what I’ve been up to right?
Depends.
Most likely case is they see you logging into TheCityBachelor.com and THEN start monitoring you. Keep in mind they can just log on and SEE your screen at any time–and whatever it is you happen to have up.
The trick is to never tip the alarm that you might be doing something else. So, if your company already uses Google Drive, you’d probably be okay. They’d never have a reason to be alert.
However, if they don’t, and you tip them off–they might start looking at you a little bit more closely. That’s when problems arise.
Kyle
Cool thanks for weighing in. I do most of my blog posts on Drive and then just copy them into wordpress later. I’ve had IT “remote in” a few times to install various software for me. So I’ve seen them take over my screens and control the mouse once I give them my IP address. However, we have almost 400k employees so I don’t think they have the manpower to really police our usage.
I would say yes. Write drafts on google drive, and then do work / upload blog posts on your site once you get home.
I myself work in a corporate/hand’s-on job for one of the major logistics company at the terminal level, which means that I work with primarily around men. Prior to this I had worked for a small business where I was the only man, and feel much better working in this current job, which is a masculine environment void almost totally of SJW’s. This leads me into the next tip for all guys which is to examine what ratio of men to women in the work environment suits your personality.
That’s really not a bad idea at all. I much enjoyed my first corporate job (probably 95% of men in the office total (out of 200)) and my team was 100% men.
The second job (that drove me to quit) was about 50/50 and I always had to watch my mouth. Including have a female boss who really, truly had no idea what she was doing.
Go take the O*Net Interest Profiler. That will help you understand your temperament and direct you towards job fields better suited to you.
Then check the US Bureau of Labor statistics website. Use your interest to find a suitable job in a field with at least above average projected growth. Pursue it.
If you are a family man you should not leave your current job till you have a new one lined up.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7aa149d7f260ce743e5be8e919550799c28c4618ba56a4f6c6e5761e4a75ab6b.jpg
If you are a bachelor you won’t have to.
Thanks for chiming in.
The jobs I worked in the past were likable when I started. Then, my feelings for them had changed. I learned the jobs and the types of people (coworkers, customers, and bosses alike) I had to deal.
The current job I am working is no different. But, I am thankful to the Lord God for it. Although it is better than nothing, I want something (e.g. a successful online business) better than the current job.