The blog

When the time when you would ben­e­fit the most from chang­ing your work habits is the high­est, the thresh­old to do so may also be at its high­est. You have so much to do right now, you are so tired and there is no ener­gy left for any­thing oth­er than the essen­tials. All the more rea­son to make the change that you know is need­ed right now.

Dai­ly job crafting

In a study, pub­lished a cou­ple of years ago, researchers Shi, She, Li, Zhang and Niu found that peo­ple who dai­ly engage in what they call ​“job craft­ing” are more alert and less tired at the end of the day com­pared to oth­ers. ​“Job craft­ing” is sim­ply to devel­op your work in small steps often. Every day you refine how you work so that your job fits you as well as the organ­i­sa­tion you are work­ing for.

Three kinds of changes

Three oth­er researchers, named Berg, Dut­ton and Wrzes­niews­ki, describe that job craft­ing at least involves one of three kinds of changes:

1. You change the scope of the work by tak­ing on addi­tion­al tasks or let­ting go of tasks.
2. You change the rela­tion­ships with your col­leagues — for exam­ple, tak­ing more ini­tia­tive to involve them in your work than before or help­ing them more.
3. You change how you view your work tasks — for exam­ple, pay­ing more atten­tion to your­self of what the work leads to in a larg­er per­spec­tive (”help­ing peo­ple who have been in an acci­dent” com­pared to ​“han­dling dam­age reports”).

What is extra inter­est­ing, I think, is that the afore­men­tioned researchers found that for job crafters, the recov­ery also occurred dur­ing the work­day and not only out­side of work after the end of the workday.

The refine­ment of the work con­tributed to the recovery.

Do this

If you rec­og­nize that ​“there’s a lot going on” and you know that there are things in the way you work that you could ben­e­fit from chang­ing, make the change today.

If there is no par­tic­u­lar change you have planned to make ​“lat­er”, be open dur­ing the day to thoughts like ​“I would ben­e­fit from hav­ing a tem­plate here” or ​“it would be eas­i­er if I …”, or ​“here is that doc­u­ment I always have to look for” or some­thing sim­i­lar. Instead of think­ing ​“yeah, I’ll get to that when things calm down”, take action now. If the change is big, at least take the first step.

Com­mit to refin­ing, chang­ing and improv­ing one thing every day so that you make it a habit to always shape your job.

Recov­ery Dur­ing Work

If you engage in job form­ing activ­i­ties, you will, accord­ing to the men­tioned study, feel more alert and less tired at the end of the day. You also get recov­ery dur­ing inten­sive days and, not least, your work will become bet­ter and bet­ter, more and more the way you want it.

What do you do?

What changes do you make as a job craft­ing today? Feel free to share with me! 

(Does the research inspire you to get start­ed? One tip is to start by mak­ing a map of your dig­i­tal doc­u­ments!)