You Can Turn a Job You Hate Into One You Like

New York Magazine:

Not long ago, Kate Tolo took a walk with her co-worker during their lunch break. “I’m going to quit,” she confided in her colleague. “I hate this and I can’t do it anymore.” Tolo was working for a luxury denim company in Brooklyn, and while her job title was impressive — assistant technical designer — she wasn’t happy with her daily tasks, measuring and pinning jeans for quality assurance. But she didn’t really want to quit; she liked the company and its CEO, and she was wary of starting over somewhere else. She wanted the best of both worlds: to stay at her current job anddo something she thoroughly enjoyed.

…

Yale researcher and professor Amy Wrzesniewski would call what Tolo did “job crafting,” her term for what happens when employees redesign their current job in a more satisfying way. Tolo changed her tasks to make the job more meaningful, but job crafting doesn’t have to be that direct. You can craft your job by simply changing the way you think about it, Wrzesniewski says, which can affect your experience. “One of the things I find exciting about job crafting is it’s not just about getting people to think about their work differently. It’s behavioral,” she told me. “Changing the way you think about a job cognitively changes the way you approach your tasks, then changes how those tasks would then unfold.”

Read the whole story: New York Magazine