Boredom springs from monotony. You can be busy and still bored if your tasks are always the same or don't intellectually stimulate you. Many people who were thrown into working from home (WFH) at the start of the pandemic may have felt bored at some point. The tedious sameness of sitting in front of your computer day in day out eventually bores everyone.
But this doesn't mean that working from home is inherently boring. The great power of WFH is that you can design your workday as you please. Particularly when combined with flexible hours and asynchronous communication, WFH gives you the ability to build the life you want.
But you need to be explicit about building it. In fact, you may need to do some planning. The cure to boredom is novelty, but when you're in a relatively controlled environment such as your home, novelty doesn't happen spontaneously. You have to break your routine deliberately.
Routine shrinks time, because it provides no new information for your brain to record. The weekend is a great opportunity to break your routine. Do something new. Be spontaneous. You'll come out of the weekend much more refreshed.
— X-Team (@xteam) July 16, 2021
Breaking your routine needn't be hard. It could be as simple as switching up your environment. Once a week, take your laptop and work from somewhere else. Go to your favorite coffee shop or pay for a day pass in a co-working space (if you're an X-Teamer, you can expense both the coffee and the day pass with your Unleash+ budget).
Alternatively, you could redecorate your office space. Make it fun. Add art, add plants, add a splash of color if your room is otherwise dark or gray. You can also rearrange things every once in a while to make your office feel fresh. You're there many hours a day; you might as well make it look nice.
Another way to break the monotony is by finding a hobby that takes you away from your desk. Something that brings you joy. Or, at least, something that you think will bring you joy. You won't immediately know what you like or don't like when you're searching for a new hobby.
That's why you need to experiment first. Go bouldering, try out Brazilian jiu-jitsu, take a drama class. The awkwardness you feel trying out things for the first time is absolutely worth it when you finally find something you can enjoy for years, if not decades.
To conclude, if you feel bored working from home, break the monotony. Work from someplace else once in a while. Redecorate your office space. Take up a new hobby. Working from home gives you the freedom to build the life you want. You just need to be deliberate about making it happen.
