04 Sep Entrepreneur Tip of the Week: Battle Your Boredom!

There comes a point in your career where you are just plain bored with what you do. The days when you would jump out of bed in the morning, ready to face the challenges ahead, are gone. I’m sure you’ve all experienced this, and you’ve probably asked yourself at one point, “How did this happen?” How did work become such a drag? Battling boredom can be hard to do, but a good first step is to figure out exactly what brought you to feel this way about your business.

I find that there are three main causes of boredom: too much growth, too much delegation and a bad fit between entrepreneur and choice of business. Growth is what we call a good problem.  When your business is expanding, new responsibilities arise such as more management, meetings, reports and committees. I often tell my clients that boredom increases directly with the increase in the size of a company’s middle management. Similar to the effects of too much growth, delegation in excess leaves you with not much to do. When finding the source of your boredom, maybe you need to look at the bigger picture. It is common for entrepreneurs to realize that they are not enjoying work simply because they are in the wrong business.

Boredom can be a hard to overcome, but I think there are three routes that are the most effective. The first is to sell, leave, or shut down. This is probably the best response to if you realize that you are in the wrong business. The second way to battle boredom is to check your personality. Are you the type of person who will enjoy being in a company from the time it was a startup to when it becomes very large?  Finally, try to re-engage. Focus on some aspect of the business; there is always something else to improve. Create a new project for yourself, invest your time in a new product line or lead an examination to see if improvement in your business is possible.