The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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My job as a tax accountant is killing me with its sheer, soul-crushing boredom and monotony. Starting out it felt much better due to the fact that I actually had to pick up many aspects of the job on my own, but at this point absolutely no part of the job surprises me or challenges me at all, and it's effectively become a huge production line where I optimise for efficiency in tax preparation (sometimes even over the quality of the work, since I've gotten some comments that I should be striving not for perfection but trying to balance that with output). I'm certainly not the fastest employee in the firm in terms of efficiency, but as it stands I'm currently burning through all my jobs faster than people can allocate me new work (our billing/charge-out rate is still so high relative to the amount we actually end up charging the client that there are still write-offs). My managers state they're impressed with my ability to pick up concepts and the high quality of my workpapers, I personally think this is called not being retarded.
I was recently assigned one of the toughest workpapers in the firm. I looked through it. It does not look difficult. They're thinking of making me reviewer on certain jobs because they think I know the job well enough to do a high level review. I should be happy that they feel confident enough about my work to do such a thing, but at the same time every part of the job is an utterly predictable slog. It feels like they're essentially paying me to be the accounting version of a code monkey. Working for even 1 hour makes me feel like I'm being suffocated and I barely recover over the weekends. I keep myself awake through the workday with enough coffee to make my hands shake.
There's also the fact that I feel like people have effectively taken much of my work for granted - there was a time early in my career where I was working on one of the most demanding clients, and helped a superior of mine complete some work that was their responsibility by working until 4am on Friday and coming in on Saturday, just one day before I was supposed to travel for Christmas. That very same year, I effectively got a "Meets Expectations" (a score of 3) on my performance review, and a bonus... of 2% of my already-pretty-low salary. After many experiences like these I no longer care about going above and beyond, but even with that mindset I can't help but be bored to tears with the repetitious and unchallenging nature of my current work. How people can find this in any way rewarding is beyond me. It's fucking obscene.
I guess I should feel lucky I'm not saddled with super long hours (not typically, at least). It's certainly not the worst work out there - most jobs are pretty terrible. But the malaise from this is bleeding into my everyday life.
Corporations in general do not reward professionals for staying. Performance reviews are justification pieces for why they will not increase your remuneration. If you're skilled as you say, you should jump ship.
As an aside I once had a line manager refuse my promotion due to being 'not quite' qualified in a field not directly related to my work. He told me 'don't worry I'm sure you'll easily qualify next year'.
I quit, started my own business and tripled my income.
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