Job Crafting: Make Your Job Work For You

Do you find yourself in a job you used to like, but you are now wondering where the sparkle went? Do you wish you had more time for the part of your job you love? Instead, you are chasing emails, slack messages, and meeting after meeting?

If that sounds familiar, this blog post is for you!

Let me introduce you to an effective strategy to bring more meaning, purpose, joy and satisfaction into your job: job crafting.

What is job crafting?

Job crafting is a technique that can help you de-stress your job, invite more meaning into your work/life and help you focus on the areas in which you can truly shine.

Job crafting is about altering your job to better suit your strengths, talents, skills, and interests. It’s a process that you might do already in parts of your job. Here is a recipe that you can follow to start the crafting process more purposefully:

How to start crafting your job

Observe.

Your first task is to become your observer. During your workday, pay attention to how you feel and which tasks make you shine. Use these questions to guide your reflection:

Which activities energise me?

Which tasks or projects make me feel happy?

What am I doing when I get absorbed and lose track of time at work?

Find Patterns.

After a week or so, you will have a list of activities to analyse for patterns. Identifying patterns helps to define broader categories of things that make you happy and are meaningful to you. Here are some helpful questions:

What patterns do you see?

Do you prefer to work with others or alone?

What is your main driver?

How many opportunities for these activities do you currently get in your job?

Do they happen at a specific time of day?

Start Crafting.

Once you have the magic types of things you love, start looking at ways to bring these more to life in your day-to-day. Think about how you could improve areas of your job to be more in line with yourself.

What can you do more of?

What can you do less of?

What projects can you get involved in that fit your patterns?

Balance.

We all have different energy curves throughout the day. Some of us start the day full of energy and get most of their job done before lunch. Others are more productive in the afternoon or evening. Within your responsibilities at work, try to arrange tasks to fit you better. One way to do that is to plan your tasks according to your natural energy levels —schedule energy-consuming activities during your high-productivity time. Move re-energising tasks to a time when you are a bit tired and need a booster.

If you want to help your team start job crafting, I facilitate interactive job crafting workshops for organisations of all sizes. Drop me a note to learn more.