7 Ways to be happy at work
20 Jul 2010

Seven ways to be happy at work

2 mins to read
Love your job - comedian, author and ABC presenter James O’Loghlin told this year’s Happiness and Its Causes Conference just how it’s done.


Part of leading a happy life is working out what makes you happy and what sorts of things you want to be doing more of. Then you need to be proactive and strategic in leading the kind of life that makes you happy. Often we’re smart and creative in our jobs, but dumb in our lives.

Now I’m not suggesting that we can ever get the perfect balance between work and life, but maybe if we cultivate certain skills, we can get a bit closer to where we want it to be. But it won’t happen unless we make an effort. We should constantly be asking ourselves why we do something a certain way and whether there’s a better way to do it (and whether that way would make us happier). We should keep examining every detail of our lives to ensure we’re living it as best we can.

Try and audit your life. Ask yourself the big questions: what sort of person do I want to be, and what sort of life do I want to lead? Ask yourself if you can get a bit of time back from work, how would you spend it? Do more fishing, gardening, meditating? If you can get as specific as you can, that will give you a better chance at making real change.

We could all be more efficient at work. Often we aren’t motivated. Many of us think of work as a second home, somewhere we have to be from this hour to this hour every weekday. If you want to rebalance your life, you need to stop thinking this way. It is important to think about work as a place you go to work as well as one where you work efficiently as possible. The sooner you finish your work, the quicker you can get out there and enjoy your life beyond the office. 

  1. Try and use your travel time efficiently like on the train—use a smart phone/computer and you can add an hour of work to your day.
  2. Try and disengage yourself from office politics. Ninety per cent of it doesn’t help you do your job better, it just makes you stressed. Try and walk away from it all.
  3. Make your break short but effective. Get out in the fresh air and walk around to come back more invigorated.
  4. Deal with others more efficiently—there are now three ways we can communicate with each other at work: phone, email, face to face. Work out which is the most time efficient and it might vary between people (if someone is a chatterbox, email might be best).
  5. At work we often have to make things perfect. I think it is important to do things as well as you can and make sure you hit the standards that are required, but often you spend an hour getting something to 90 per cent and another hour getting it to 93 per cent. Sometimes we just do that for ourselves—it’s not necessary.
  6. If you have worked really hard for seven hours and others have wasted time, you shouldn’t feel guilty for leaving before him or her. If you do in seven hours what others do in nine hours, your boss should dock your colleague’s pay for the extra electricity and coffee!
  7. You can introduce a lot of these strategies incrementally and without telling anyone. You don’t suddenly leave an hour early—you leave 10 minutes early, and another 10mins earlier and see what happens.

It is tricky and it is easier to just go along the same way as everyone else and not rock the boat. Remember though, we are talking about how we live our lives. And how silly are we going to feel if we get to the end and we realise we were too narrowly focused, didn’t spend enough time with the people that mattered most to us, and we weren’t clever or brave enough to start thinking about how we can turn our jobs not into a sense of ‘demand and give’ between employer and employee, but a constant negotiation between what our employer wants and what is important to us?



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