Why Quitting Your Job Can Make You a Better Employee
How do you know if you are doing your job properly? You may be asking yourself what you are leaving unfinished.
In ThriveGloba l Jessica Hicks identifies three working habits to avoid if you want to remain productive and maintain a good balance between work and personal life, and one of these bad habits in the workplace – to force yourself to perform every task on your list every day :
As the end of the day approaches, you may feel frustrated if you have n’t done what you wanted to accomplish . While you may feel frustrated at first, having one or two unfinished tasks can actually be a sign that you are successfully prioritizing your day. You may not have been able to schedule a meeting, but you have completed an important report that should be the next day – in this case, you were able to complete your most urgent task and can schedule an appointment the next day when you receive new energy. and have a new set of priorities.
By being aware of “incompleteness,” as Hicks puts it, you better understand both your priorities (the tasks you do, no matter what) and your skills (the tasks you naturally gravitate towards and / or avoid or postpone for later). . on the).
In other words: if you’ve spent most of your day getting great results but haven’t submitted expense reports, you’ve probably prioritized right. At some point, these expense reports will have to be filed – the standard advice is to set aside a portion of your time every week or every two weeks specifically for this kind of administrative work – but you’ve successfully avoided them interrupting your most important tasks.
On the other hand, if you find yourself spending all day on low-priority tasks and avoiding projects that make up the bulk of your work, it’s worth figuring out why you aren’t prioritizing your most important work.
For example, maybe you are not entirely sure about the next step in your project. Maybe you’re part of an ineffective or demotivating team, or maybe you know that completing your project means a lengthy criticism session with a manager you don’t like.
There may be other stresses in your life that make it difficult for you to focus on something more challenging than checking your email. Perhaps you lack sleep, sunlight, or social activity.
Perhaps your workday is so interspersed with meetings and checks that you don’t have enough time to give the project the attention it needs.
But maybe you are just putting off the things you like least. Some of us love to write expense reports but hate writing quarterly reports. We might prefer to organize rather than generate, do dozens of small assignments instead of one big project, or work in teams rather than alone.
If you constantly find yourself avoiding the bulk of your job – the things they literally hired you to do – prioritizing other aspects of your job that are more satisfying, that could be a sign that you are in the wrong position and should start. look for a job that is better suited.
So look at what you leave unfinished at the end of a typical workday. If this is a low priority job, you may be a better employee than you think. If this is a top priority, it might be time to find a job that you can spend your days doing the kind of job you excel at – be it doing similar work for a company that provides the kind of structure you need to get it done. , or work that allows you to focus on work that you naturally prioritize.