5 fatal reasons why you are bored

Why are you bored in your job?

I was recently interviewed about boreout for a programme on the Danish channel Radio 4. Unlike previous interviews, this one became focused on the main reasons why so many employees are bored in their jobs. In this post, I dare to mention a few taboo and/or controversial pet subjects.

These are the 5 fatal reasons why you are bored:

1. Yourself – mainly due to your high IQ
2. The job and/or the boss – not the best match for you
3. Technology – everyone has to be their own secretary
4. Meaningless pseudowork – management instead of leadership
5. Taboos in society – no one dares to take a stand against the boredom.

When you are very bored for a long time, you risk being affected by boreout – a chronic type of boredom, which may have symptoms similar to burnout or stress. In the best-case scenario, you work more slowly, while in the worst case you will be put on sick leave. The more bored you are and the longer this goes on, the more it will affect your self-confidence, preventing you from making an impact if you are interviewed for another job – and you will be caught in a downward spiral.

Try the Boreout Test for yourself

 

1. You are bored because you are intelligent

If you are among the 10% most gifted, you have a steeper learning curve than 90% of the population, which means that you also get bored faster. In the test mentioned above, the average for the norm group (3,000 managers and white-collar workers aged 20-65 years) is around 50.

The saying goes that “intelligent people are never bored”. That is not true. Quite the contrary, in fact.

The higher the IQ, the greater the boredom. And this begins already at nursery school, when children are only allowed to learn one new letter each week. Or when they are told to do more of the same maths exercises that are far too easy and boring.

One of my highly gifted clients described it this way:

I didn’t go to school to learn anything. I went to school to show others what I could do!

But putting her hand up in class was a wasted effort – because the teachers still had to ask all the children and give them a chance to answer. In other words, the most intelligent people learn from an early age that they should just stay quiet, keep their knowledge to themselves and try to be like everyone else. This is one of the reasons why a lot of gifted people feel wrong in some way and develop low self-esteem. Many of them are also affected by impostorism.

 

2. You are bored because your job and/or your manager is wrong

Many of the most intelligent people have faced being turned down after several interviews:

We don’t think we’ll be able to hold on to you.

You seem overqualified for the job.

On other occasions, you might land a job that soon turns out to be completely different from what you were made to expect.

When the job is the wrong one for you, you quickly run out of tasks and challenges. There’s far too little work to do, and then your manager says:

“Why don’t you take it a little easier? Leave something for everybody else to do.”

This means that you have also got the wrong manager, as this person does not know how to make good use of your skills and your great potential.

Far too many managers lack the imagination and courage to employ someone intelligent. The job is like a narrow, square box, where you are supposed to replace a former “square-shaped” employee. Ideally, you should be a recruitment agency’s dream match – someone who has experience in the exact same position and industry. What they want is plug and play from day 1.

Admittedly, intelligent employees can be demanding. They ask questions. They want explanations and good reasons why a given task has to be solved in a particular way. In return, they are able to think outside the box, and they can be faster and better at solving the tasks. Nevertheless, a lot of them need meaning and purpose in order to give their best (especially if they tend to follow the square curve performance pattern).

 

3. Technology has made your work more boring

Some of my views on this issue might seem controversial, but seriously:

why are caring hands being forced to use a computer?

Demanding that care workers, nurses and others who primarily work with people should also know how to operate a computer is all very well – if they do so in their spare time, or if they have to help an elderly person to use digital services such as MitID. But for the rest of the time, surely they have plenty of other tasks that are much more important such as personal care, general support and empathic, mindful conversations with people who are often alone for most of the day.

So, I don’t blame you if you are bored doing timesheets or similar.

Why do managers have to be their own secretaries as well?

Back in the late 1980’s when I entered the labour market as an office trainee, far from everyone at work had a PC. It was the secretaries who kept track of the managers’ calendars, wrote their letters and dealt with all the administrative work. A secretary had an eye for detail and was extremely good at spelling and grammar, just as she (usually a woman) could fly around the keyboard at lightning speed. This allowed the manager to focus on strategies and what to include in meetings, make decisions and be a great leader for their staff.
Today, the managers themselves have to read and reply to the many emails (often 100+) they receive every day, make an endless number of PowerPoints for meetings and remember to save their boarding passes and various receipts, so that they can follow the correct administrative procedure to fill in a travel expense report.

No wonder if you often feel that your days are fragmented and mainly spent dealing with boring tasks. Add to this that the internet has ruined your chances of taking proper time off when you get home – because you can always go online for a bit, and that means you are always available…

Technology is both a blessing and a curse. But at the very least, shouldn’t employees be allowed to carry out the type of work that actually creates value?!

 

4. You are bored because of meaningless pseudowork

When I quit my career as an HR Manager in 2011, it was mainly because I had found myself spending more and more time entering figures and names into spreadsheets as well as developing procedures and processes, which I then had to make sure others were following. In other words: management rather than leadership. That was definitely not what had made me choose a career in Human Resources, so I went on to write my book Behovsbestemt HR-ledelse  (Need-based HR Leadership).

Those persons who mainly work with people and perform tangible physical work are rarely affected by boreout – because they get immediate feedback on their efforts, achieve visible results and make a difference to someone else.

How much of your daily working hours do you spend solving meaningful and value-creating tasks – together with or for other people?
And how much of your time do you waste on pointless record-keeping and pseudowork?

 

5. Taboos keep everyone trapped in boredom

Several taboos exist in the job market, which may be part of the reason why so many people are bored and suffering in secret:

No one is allowed to be more intelligent than others in the Danish society of mediocrity.

No one wants to admit that they’re bored, because intelligent people supposedly never get bored.

No one dares to say that they haven’t got enough to do, because that could lead to them losing their job or the authority losing its budget.

No one has the will to stop the pseudowork, because being busy has become a high-status indicator.

No one is allowed to feel too grand for boring routine tasks, because that will make them seem spoiled and snobbish about education.

What can YOU do to change some of these taboos or the reasons that you are bored? Well, perhaps you could start by sharing this post in your network…

Please note: If you score above 30 in the Boreout Test, you can get in touch with me for feedback and support on how to escape the boreout spiral.

Yours truly, taking a stand against boredom,
Ann C.

 

Read also:

10 signs that you are more gifted than you think
4 reasons why gifted people cannot fall in line
Have you found the right job?