Insouciance.

You know the scene, laying by the pool, sand between your toes, being fanned by a super model, drinking an ice cold beer watching your team on the big screen, all the while contemplating the night's festivities to come. Then someone in the 10 o'clock meeting asks you a question and you are right back where you started, bored at work. You try as hard as you can but nothing sways you from turning off and sitting zombie like in your cubicle, your office or the lunch room. Depending on which report you read, 25% to 80% of people are bored at work too much of the time, bored with their job and bored bored bored. Even at the low end of those statistics, a lot of people are being paid for just showing up and no one, least of all the bordee, the apathetic, benumbed, detached, moribund, jaded, stultified, torpid and hebetudinous( who knew, so many words for
bored )is making any effort to change the situation. Who's responsible, who's accountable, who's answerable, who cares?

The many reasons for being bored at work, including environment and work practice not being challenging enough, you are a pirate born two hundred years too late, through to repetition of tasks that numb the brain all have antidotes, maybe not the pirate. No one disagrees that patches of boredom creep into every job, even rock stars get bored of the money and girls being thrown at them? Okay, certainly the finance departments get bored with the same old receipts and reconciliations.

Taking a lead from the experts, clearing that lingering inbox, decluttering your desk and work area, straightening your tie and then getting on with the job at hand, after all it's a job not a hobby, gives rise to push back from people wanting more in their work day. The problem today being the majority of people work in office confines in artificial environments without a lot of stimuli to keep them active, motivated and challenged beyond their job description. That is of course, unless you work for the Google like companies looking to continually stimulate and galvanise their staff for greater success.

So step outside of those confines when that Tse Tse fly of boredom comes buzzing around and create your own Google complex with new endeavours to keep you energised, like meditation, drama lessons over the phone to give you that radio announcer voice you've always wanted, sit ups to start your new fitness regime, use the powers of restorative healing and take a nap, play Sudoku, read a blog (hint), write the great Australian novel or just gravitate to things you do well and do them even better. If all of that fails why not look for a new job, it certainly couldn't hurt.

Everyone has a choice not to be bored to death at work and as Norman Mailer pointed out,
"The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war", it can be sole destroying, so don't battle it out in the trenches, get creative, go crazy, stay alive, not bored to death.