Your Job Is Boring? Here's 2 Ways to Make It Better

Is your job boring? I mean, brain drying up inside your head boring? All of us have some part of our work that we do that isn't thrilling or exciting all the time, but some of you may have jobs that are really boring. Maybe you're a recent college graduate and you spent all this time building skills to do exciting things you trained for, and you're in a job that's not doing those things. Or maybe you're just new in your field and you're doing the lowest level of activity in your category, in your field, in your discipline, and it's boring. Once you've figured out the basics of it, it's repetitive or tedious or boring or whatever.

Hi, I'm Todd Jensen, and I talk about how the world of work really works. So if you're new in the job market or a recent graduate in a job that's not in your field, you're not alone. Look at this data from the New York Fed.

If you're new to the job market or a recent graduate, it's common in my country, the United States, to be underemployed. According to the New York Fed, which is where this chart comes from — and this is Q1 2026 data — about 35% of college graduates are underemployed. That number is around 42% if you are a recent graduate, and you can see that number's been similar for many years. Well, that doesn't help you much other than feeling like maybe you're not entirely alone. In other countries, I know it can be much more severe.

So all those qualified people end up going into other types of jobs. So however you got here, you're here, you're unhappy, you need the job, you need to keep the job, and you're a little bit miserable. So let me help. Let me give you two ideas that will make you less miserable.

The first suggestion I'll make is: find something in that job to care about. If you need to keep the job, then don't spend your time on the job looking for another job. Employers see that. That's a reality in the world of work. They can tell when you're not engaged. They can tell when you're dissatisfied and you're looking on company time for some other job. And in my experience, in many cases, there's a line a mile long of people who would like to be in that job. So if that's what they notice about you and it doesn't change, you're gone, and they're gonna bring one of those other people in that's excited to have the job and that's gonna be doing something with it.

So you have to find something to care about in that job. You have to find something to engage you, even though it doesn't seem like it's the fit for what you wanna do for a long time. You can look for another job all weekend and at nights and in the mornings, but when you come to work, be at work and find something to be excited about.

One example is being a good team member. If you're in a job and there's other people around you, focus on being a good team member. Who else on the team seems to be struggling? Is there something you can do to help them? Are there extra tasks or work that you can take on to help somebody get their feet or get caught up on something? Is there something you can add to the mixture of the team that's positive — a leadership example, an energy that you bring to your task? Being a good team member is important in any job that you have where you work with other people.

Another part of finding something to care about is: maybe you're process-oriented. You like improving things. You like looking at how things happen and how long it takes. Make it a game to get better at what you do. The boring stuff took you an hour to do yesterday. Figure out a way to do it in fifty minutes, or forty-five minutes. Keep your quality high, but figure out how to be more efficient, how to be more effective at that particular job. That's engaging. That's interesting. That's a driving, exciting kind of thing to do.

Maybe it's the customers. I'll give you an example. I was in a leadership position in a big organization, and there were lots of changes above me, and I ended up going into a support team, and I hated it. I didn't really like the team. I didn't like a lot of the team members, but I needed the job, and I needed to stay there. As soon as I stopped feeling like I was too good for this job, or that the support job was beneath me, and I started focusing on the customers who were calling for the kinds of issues that we were there to support — it was a small team, there were only like five or six of us, so there was a pretty big variety in the kinds of things we got to handle and deal with — I really started to enjoy that. I like problem-solving, and I liked making customers happy. I like making them laugh. I like making them feel like they're not stupid for calling because they had this problem. I'd tell them, "Hey, lots of people have that problem. We're not very clear about the instructions on this particular thing, so let me walk you through it." And when I would get off that call, and they were grateful, and they felt good about what they had learned how to do, that felt great. That was engaging to me.

Did I wanna stay in that job for another year or two years? No. I needed to move on, and I spent my time trying to figure out how I was gonna get into a different job. But while I was there, I enjoyed being on the phone. I enjoyed dealing with customers and their problems and their challenges, and sometimes people were cranky, and sometimes people were gracious. But overall, I felt like I was solving problems. I felt like I was making a difference, and that engaged me. So find something to care about and dive into it and engage it, and other people will notice. Your team will notice. Your boss will notice. And other opportunities might open themselves because of that. But even if they don't, those skills, those abilities you develop while you're doing that will make you valuable in any other job.

Here's the second thing I think you should do: change your aperture. Now, in photography, in your phone camera, there's a lens, and while the lens is wide, it lets in the maximum amount of light. And so when your lens is wide — you're in portrait mode on your phone — the flower or the person that you're focusing your picture on at that aperture is very detailed, very vibrant, and everything else is a little blurry. You can see it in my background here. I just figured out a new mode on my camera, and I think the quality's better. I'm pretty excited about that. If your aperture is narrow, then the lens is letting in less light, and everything in the picture is in focus.

So what I mean by changing your aperture — I'll use an example. I was in another job, a supervisory job, and I loved it. There was just a lot of stuff going on in this job, and I had to pay attention to all of it. And then I moved into a job where I was mostly working on my own, and it was analytical, and I had to zero in and focus on detail: contracts and processes and approvals and connections and setups and systems and all this kind of stuff. Well, I didn't enjoy that at all. That was miserable to me. So I had to learn to change my aperture. I went into work used to seeing everything in detail, and I was in a job where I had to zoom in and have that vivid camera mode like you have on your camera, where you can see every little nuanced detail.

Well, that changed my relationship to that job when I changed my aperture. Instead of looking and thinking, "Oh, this isn't great," and wishing I had all these five things to do instead of this one thing to do — when I changed my aperture and I just zoomed in and I had one thing that I was paying attention to and paying attention to every vivid detail of it, it changed. It changed my attitude. It changed how I approached the job. I started thinking, "Well, okay, there's like 25 steps in this whole process, so I'm gonna map them all out, see how long they all take. Some of them I'm in control of, some of them I'm not in control of, but I'm gonna see how long it takes, and I'm gonna start mapping my time across all these things." And then I started thinking, "Okay, well, I do have some control there. I think I can do that quicker. And what if I pre-did these things so that when this came, I could handle that more quickly?"

And so, do you see what I'm trying to help you understand here? If you engage in a job, find something that you care about, and change your aperture to fit the task that you've been given to do, that world can be interesting. That world can give you opportunities to provide value, to do something useful, and to leave at the end of the day thinking, "Okay, well, I still want a different job, but I got this done, and I got it done 5% faster than I did the last time, and I think there's two other areas that I'm gonna focus on and see if I can make those better."

Well, what that also changed was how I was perceived. All of a sudden, in that unit that I was in, somebody new came in to do the exact same job, just in a different part of the world, and I was assigned to train them because I understood the process. I appeared to understand the process better than anybody else, even though I had been there less time than anybody else. So I had a training opportunity. Now I had my job to do, but I also had the challenge of helping somebody else figure out how to do that job. And that was interesting, and that took another five or six months of being interesting and having challenges and problems to solve and reducing the time that I had to do all these other things — which was engaging and interesting to me.

So your ability to succeed in any job is improved by doing these kinds of things, even in a situation where you're overqualified or you're underemployed. Trust me, it'll make a difference. It'll help you succeed in that job, and it'll help you be better at other jobs when you take them on.

Well, thank you for joining me. Make sure to like and subscribe and join me on this journey where we talk about how the world of work really works.