Jenny Washed Dishes 4 Times

Creative Commons, by NicTaylor

Inside the Dishwasher by NicTaylor, CC

Takeaway: While we may go paid big bucks to do knowledge work, noesis piece of work oft doesn't offering us equally much structure, challenge, or feedback every bit jobs that are more than hands-on, which can make it less motivating. Luckily, it's possible to hack your job to make it significantly more engaging.

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes, 20s.

Angry Birds: Dishes Edition

Over the last several months I've been having a recurring dream: I'm back in high school—more than a decade ago—and I'm working at my very showtime job. Before my productivity project, internships, and business schoolhouse, my first chore was washing dishes for a Canadian Italian fast food articulation named East Side Mario's. (If you're from the U.South., East Side Mario'south is kind of like the Olive Garden, merely the breadsticks aren't every bit expert.)

Out of all of the real jobs I've had, that chore was past far my favorite. It was my offset task—which made earning that sweet, sweet dough feel even more amazing. But what I loved almost, surprisingly, was the task itself.

Washing dishes at East Side Mario'south involved doing 4 things that were uncomplicated, but for me, incredibly addictive:

Hosing down the dishes to rinse off the remaining food particles
Neatly organizing the dishes onto a tray
Running that tray through the dishwasher, which rinsed, polished, and stale them off
Giving those clean dishes back to the kitchen to be used again

To me, washing dishes felt like an addictive video game, similar Temple Run, Tetris, or Angry Birds. It was repetitive, but the chore was always just challenging plenty. On slow nights I did all the dishes myself, and when we had dozens of dishes coming in every minute on fast nights, I did them with a partner. I always washed. I loved the challenge—the dishes ever came in incredibly fast—and I looked forwards to it for nigh of the 24-hour interval. If you asked what job I felt the nearly productive in, I would immediately say washing dishes.

In my view, productivity isn't nearly how much you produce, information technology's about how much yous accomplish. And past this definition, since I accomplished the least washing dishes compared to my other jobs, I was the least productive. Merely even though my other jobs were more productive, washing dishes still felt the most productive in the moment. It's entirely counterintuitive, simply when yous look at washing dishes, the job has all of the traits to exist more motivating than an part job. The chore has a ton of structure, claiming, and a never-catastrophe stream of rewards and feedback.

If you desire to make your work more than motivating, ane of the all-time places to plough to for inspiration, curiously enough, is video games. A video gamer is never non motivated to play a video game. If she has some minutes to spare, she'll almost instinctually pull out her smartphone or controller to showtime playing. Different piece of work, there's no hurdle she has to overcome to begin playing video games. Positive psychologists accept looked into why playing video games makes you feel more than productive than doing actual piece of work.

Nintendo_controller

Video games are designed, from the bottom upwards, to simulate productivity. Almost every video game gives you lot:

Structure. Video games are incredibly structured—they're comprised of concrete rules, incremental levels, and evolving goals. This structure has been shown to channel our attention toward the game's greater goals to make our experience more than rewarding. Video games are a welcome reprieve from piece of work that feels ambiguous, unstructured, and cluttered.
Rewards and feedback. The rewards in video games are successive and immediate. While at work we receive the odd compliment and a performance review every quarter, in a video game, rewards are plentiful. As Jane McGonigal suggests in her book Reality is Broken, the feedback systems in video games—progress bars, points, levels, and coins collected—are inescapable, and always guiding us toward our goal. Equally she writes, "[r]eal-time feedback serves as a promise to the players that the goal is definitely achievable, and information technology provides motivation to keep playing."
Claiming. Unlike work, which becomes more or less challenging depending on what your boss throws at you, video games are usually just challenging enough. Yous go more skilled as you progress through the levels of a game, and the challenge of each level unremarkably rises to lucifer your skill. This also makes you more likely to achieve "flow," that magical state where you become so engrossed in your piece of work that fourth dimension doesn't seem to exist at all.

If you were to take these characteristics, and blueprint an ideal job effectually them, yous'd come with something like washing dishes at East Side Mario'southward. In that job you lot have an incredible amount of structure: the four stages of washing dishes. The feedback is immediate: when you ho-hum down, yous immediately see the dishes pile up, and when you piece of work more efficiently, the pile shrinks. And much similar a video game, even the claiming of the work changes in real-time: you lot wash dishes alone when things are dull, and yous take a partner to share the work with if the eating house is full.

Hacking Your Job

1 sacrifice of doing work that requires mental lifting is that it's harder to appoint with it, fifty-fifty though you lot accomplish more y'all would washing dishes. This is what, to me, makes some skilled merchandise professions—like plumbing, electrical work, or structure—more attractive than knowledge work. Y'all feel more productive in them, because they're built similar a video game; they have more structure, rewards, feedback, and challenge than other jobs out there.

Creating structure, feedback, and the right level of challenge around knowledge work can be hard. I recently faced this with writing my volume. While I worked with an incredible squad for the project, writing a volume has none of the three characteristics I mentioned. It's one of the least structured tasks imaginable, the rewards and feedback are usually far in the altitude, and the claiming of writing frequently feels across your skill level.

Manifestly the championship of this article is more than of a hyperbole than anything; there is nothing that I'm fascinated by more than productivity, and every single day I feel lucky I get to explore it for a living. But it does illustrate a signal: when you lot do knowledge work for a living and you lot're not careful, your work can become intimidating and not very engaging.

If y'all're non engaged with your work, for the sake of your sanity, endeavour to make your work more structured, rewarding, and challenging. Endeavour things like:

Constantly request for more feedback
Rewarding yourself after reaching milestones in projects
Creating a daily routine for when and how long you lot'll work for
Forming a routine at work, where y'all work on certain types of tasks on certain days
Pushing dorsum on work that's not challenging enough
Working from dwelling less, if you find yourself more motivated in the office
Taking more breaks to reflect on your progress
Asking for guidance or conducting research to make piece of work less ambiguous and more structured

And if you are a manager, you lot tin use this knowledge to constantly fire up your squad—by providing constant feedback and recognition, helping your employees structure and break down their work to make it less ambiguous, and making certain everyone is challenged, only not challenged fashion beyond their skill level. This can help brand your unabridged team become more productive.

If you accept valuable and marketable skills, yous may not cease up doing work as engaging as washing dishes for a living. The reason people get paid more than than minimum wage to do knowledge piece of work is because the tasks aren't easy or repetitive; they requires heavy mental lifting, which tin likewise brand your work more than intimidating, unstructured, ambiguous, and valuable. This is a skilful thing. Simply at the same time, sometimes your encephalon resists or becomes disenchanted with your work. With enough planning, it's possible to hack your job and so you go closer to that satisfying thrill of plowing through huge stacks of dishes at Eastward Side Mario's.