Use this Playbook to increase or decrease goals for this quarter.
📗 Framework details
While burnout is linked to long hours, poor work-life balance, and our glamourization of overwork, work monotony or "boreout" happens when we are bored by our work to the point that we feel it is meaningless.
Our job seems pointless, our tasks devoid of value.
Monotony doesn't get as much attention as its workaholic cousin. Still, experts say that this phenomenon – which occurs across industries – can result in some of the same health problems for workers.
In professional sports, training monotony has been tracked for years in hopes of keeping athletes "fresh and stimulated" over four-year Olympic cycles. This focus on training monotony has led to sports scientists researching how routine monotony and the resulting strain from the relationship can affect performance.
As a founder, these same concepts should be applied to your team to help them hit their goals.
From understanding how we apply stress, give new tasks, and set goals, this focus on manipulating variables can do wonders for your people and your bonus check.
Use this Framework to take some time as a manager to overlook goals and output over the past few quarters, and chart this data over a designated time. Then, once you have your data, utilize it to make drastic changes (either up or down) to goals and job-related tasks over the next month.
See how the team responds, then sharply change the goals the following month. Either way, your team will break new barriers or recover for the next month.
When running this Framework, you usually find that prescribed work has steadily increased or stayed the same over time, with no disruption or change to the pattern. Unfortunately, this lack of stimulus change can lead to monotony, which leads to burnout.
Give it a try and see how your team responds!
📗 Next steps
Share this Playbook with your team to gather feedback.
Source your output data in your CRM, making sure to collect any KPI's or goals over a period of a few quarters. This could include call and email volume, revenue goals, social outreach etc.
Now use this data to sharply increase those goals for a period of one month. (by 10% to 20%)