Self-awareness is the very first step. If you feel you are suffering from boreout, the first thing you should do is honestly document for yourself what you spend your workdays doing. Techniker Krankenkasse recommends answering these questions honestly: How much is actually make-believe work? What is particularly boring? And what is fun?
The second step is to take the initiative. When talking to your boss, you should try to put the situation in a positive light and explain that you can do more and would be happy to take on new tasks. You should already prepare your own suggestions and ideas. “If a person affected can no longer motivate himself at all to put energy into his job, it is time for clear words to the superior to change the work situation or for a professional reorientation,” says TK.
Combat boreout
An application for another position in the company, further training in an interesting field combined with the prospect of applying to another company or even industry afterwards can be approaches for a change. It is also important to seek a mentally challenging balance in one’s free time, he said.
“In Germany, too much is prescribed at work, even for well-educated people,” says business psychologist Christian Dormann from the University of Mainz. But if you can’t help shape your work or are only assigned uninteresting projects, you may have enough work, but sooner or later you develop a reluctance to do the activities, and a paradoxical situation can arise: The boss tends to burn out because he doesn’t want to delegate important tasks, and the employee gets bored because he no longer gets anything interesting to do and has no responsibility.
For Rothlin and Werder, there are three central elements for satisfaction at work: meaning, time and finally money. The three together make up the qualitative reward, which of course goes beyond the financial aspect. If all three elements are sufficient and balanced, there is no need to fear boreout. The fact that money alone does not make people satisfied in the long run is not a truism with regard to working life. After all, if the meaningfulness of what one is doing is missing, the motivation of money will not suffice in the long run.
Therefore, an important recommendation from the authors is to “Ask yourself early in life if what you want to do really interests you.” Under no circumstances should you accept an unsatisfactory situation, but rather highlight your individual needs. After all, boreout is an individual phenomenon that can only be overcome by one’s own efforts.
