What’s the Most Boring Job You’ve Ever Had?

Three Ingredients for Engaging Work

Dear reader, what’s the most boring job you’ve ever had?

For me, it was my first job for which I received a paycheck. I was 15, and was the outdoor janitor for a small strip mall. The problem was that the grounds were never dirty! There were maybe 10 pieces of trash to pick up on a given day, and I was supposed to clean for three hours, two days a week, no matter if there was any mess or not. So I moped around with my broom and dustpan trying to look busy.

I would have preferred the strip mall to be trashed, just so I could feel like my work was worth it.

I have a friend whose job consisted of the following: he would copy and paste digital files from one place in his computer to another. Literally just pressing “Ctrl + C” and then “Ctrl + V” on hundreds of files. He would do this for about two hours each day, then spend the rest of the day either watching YouTube or wandering around his large office building, talking to execs and trying to get his job automated. Then new files would come in overnight, and he would do it all over again, day after day, week after week, like the work of Sisyphus but with a comfortable chair and computer skills.

“The part that made it boring was that it didn’t require much skill,” he told me. “It was repetitive and I had no agency to improve things. The lack of opportunity to expand your skillset and abilities makes work boring.”

Interestingly, he didn’t think the work was pointless. After all, the records did need to be moved. He was just one tiny piece of a sluggish, lumbering machine.

Another friend found that he could accomplish all of his warehouse work in just two hours out of an eight-hour shift. Not one to waste time, he built a bed for himself on top of a bunch of boxes and would sleep for the rest of his shift. (He was fired when the managers found the bed.)

I have still another friend who used to work for an advertising agency. His job was to print ads on the back of receipts to be printed in the grocery store. That’s all he did. In his estimation, “I don’t know who reads those. I’m not sure anyone needed to do that job.” Boring work is bearable – barely – if you know that it’s worthwhile.

I’ve never been bored teaching. Feeling like I’m taking crazy pills? Yes. Feeling inadequate? Yes. Feeling like all my emotions just had a six-way wreck? Yes. But bored? No way. Every minute of teaching, you feel like there’s not enough of you to go around. You always know your work is meaningful.

(Now grading papers? That is boring.)

We can see from these examples three reasons why jobs are boring:

1. If there’s no chance to use skill or to grow.

2. If the job doesn’t need to be done.

3. If the work is a small part of a large process in which it’s difficult to see one’s impact.¹

People want their work to matter. And they want to be good at what they do.

Is it any wonder, then, that kids resist the chores we give them? Most of the time, we just make them clean up! You know, the work that the adults don’t want to do. Because it’s too boring. And the house just gets messy again!

Sure, it’s likely that the kids made the mess. But there are other jobs around the house that require skill. If we involve the kids in those, they would slow us down.

Let them. If we really want kids to be motivated to do chores, we want them to grow in skill, and we want to connect with them as a family, then it’s wise to plan to teach them how to do things. Show them how to wash and dry dishes, how to dig out roots, help them plan how shelves should be organized, let them help fix the toilet, and teach them to use various tools.And yes, they should clean. Because it needs to get done. I tell my kids that every job has boring parts and interesting parts. We need to deal with the boring parts to get to the interesting parts.

Competence and growth motivate people – all people – to work.

My dad used to say “make yourself scarce.” By this he didn't mean that he wanted me to leave the room. He was teaching economics! He meant that if we want a good-paying job, we need to build skills that are rare and therefore valuable.

That’s why it’s so important to continually learn and grow as we go through life, especially while on the job. We combine old skills with new skills. We apply these skill combinations to new problems and make new creations. This allows us to find the work that is most interesting and most valuable for us.

Sure, there are still plenty of boring tasks to be done. But when we know that the work is building toward something, and we’re growing with it, it’s worth it.

Tell me about your boring job in the comments. If you want to see my deep dive on motivation and chores, here you go.

1. “School work doesn’t always have to be fun, but it should always be interesting,” my dad, formerly a 5th-grade teacher, used to say. The problem is that kids are often poor judges of what should be interesting. So teachers play a cat-and-mouse game of trying to lure students in to the sumptuous feast of knowledge. This is the eternal struggle. If you take the three points above as a guide to boring-ness, students 1) actually do know that they’re supposed to be growing, 2) but are often convinced that their assignments are meaningless busywork that don’t need to be done, and 3) they have trouble seeing the bigger picture.