If you are anything like me, you hit the highs and lows of your career. One day, you are on top of the world. Solving fun puzzles, working with fun people, the next day you find yourself stuck in the drudgery of documentation for the next 2 months, or playing in Excel to handle a data migration for long enough to make you go cross-eyed. (at least for me, those are the lows).
Much of life is how we deal with the lows. I have a tendency to fall into a bit of a slump when I hit those lows. I guess for me, so much of my time is tied up in work, and when I fall into one of the areas that doesn’t excite me, I find myself grouchy, tired and just generally unfulfilled.
When I find myself in a rut like this I have found a few things that tend to help me.
- Make a game of it. When I hit these lulls in the action, and I realize it is just a temporary thing, I find that making a game out of it helps me power through. What do I mean by a game? sometimes, I see how quickly I can get a tedious task done. For example, if I have to create 500 Object dependencies, or manually make a ton of general task lists, I’ll either work to find a new way to load them, or challenge myself to get X number done in an hour. Be sure to reward yourself with something fun if you hit your goal 🙂
- Find a good distraction. Often for me, I’ll reward myself with learning a new skill in between pieces of documentation. Something like this scenario is when I taught my GUI Scripting, arguably my most valuable skill that I’ve learned for data loading 🙂
- Take 10-15 minute reading breaks or listen to a podcast. Stop what you are doing and read a fiction book, read a good blog (like this one. ha ha ), listen to your favorite podcast, or whatever can help take your mind off the tedium. Again, use it as a reward. Get 15 pages of training documents done, then take a break.
- Maybe it’s time for a change. When I feel like my usefulness has run its course, sometimes that means it is time to find a new contract and move on from where I’m at.
- Maybe it’s time to re-evaluate everything I’m doing. This is a more recent feeling for me. I’m trying to figure out what it is that really makes me happy, what drives me, and what can I do to help people. Maybe it’s SAP, or maybe it’s something else. But it is worth the mental exercise to come up with a side project, side learning experiment, or maybe even night classes to learn something totally outside of my comfort zone.
I hope this might help you get through the rough patches,
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike