Have you ever had one of those wild commutes where you get sucked into thinking about something (or listening to the radio or a podcast) and suddenly you’re home with no real recollection of how you got there? Those are the days when your travel has been done completely via habit—you’re on autopilot.
That seems like a blissful commute, really, but it would be less pleasant if your whole week went that way, where you go from one thing to the next without having to think too deeply and with little memory of what you are doing during the workday.
That sense of drifting along from one thing to another is a sign that too much of your work is routine and can be done by habit. Habits enable you to do something because that well-practiced action is associated with the situation. Habits don’t require you to pay attention to perform them successfully. In addition, the brain is much more likely to lay down new memories when a task you’re doing is novel and requires effort than when it’s done by rote. That is why a day full of familiar activities doesn’t require much monitoring at the time and doesn’t lead to memories of what you did.
To get yourself off autopilot, you have to add more novelty and effort to your list.
To create opportunities to stretch, seek them out. Early in your career, the best way to get new opportunities is to ask for them. Supervisors often don’t want to weigh down people early in their career by giving them more than they can handle. Initiate a conversation about ways to engage in some new activities at work or to be part of other projects. The conversation may not lead to something new immediately, but it will encourage your supervisor to keep you in mind when a new project opens up.
As you progress, you need transition from solving problems you are given to identifying problems that need to be solved. That requires looking around for systematic failures. Whenever something goes wrong at work, make a note of it. Often, bad outcomes are a result of chance, a mistake, or a poor effort in the moment. If the bad outcome doesn’t repeat, then it probably isn’t worth devoting much thought to fixing it.
But if the bad outcome happens time and again, it’s a good indication that it will continue to happen unless something changes. If there is significant cost to these bad outcomes (or at least significant accumulated cost to the set of bad outcomes), then you have hit on a problem that cries out to be solved.
Before diving in to fix it, ask around. It is possible that there are other people in your organization who are already working on this issue. It’s also possible that key stakeholders in the organization are aware of the problem but believe the cost of the problem is less than the cost to fix it.
Often, though, you’ll find that nobody else is addressing the problem—even if others have noticed it. In that case, it’s fair game to take it on. Get authorization first if you need it, of course. Then build a team to help you address the problem.
The joy of taking on new assignments is that you’ll have to learn new things. You’ll engage with different people, and you’ll have meetings focused on different topics. You may have to pick up a technical skill to help you address the issue. All of this shakes you out of the autopilot rut. You can’t act by habit, and you’re sending your brain lots of cues that there are new things to learn.
As a bonus to this strategy, time will appear to slow down. In the moment, having to pay attention to the work you’re doing will make the days feel a bit longer, though they will generally be fun. When you look back over a period of time, one factor that makes it feel like it was long is the number of distinct events you can remember from it. When you are learning new things, that time span will feel longer than a stretch when you were doing things by rote. So, engaging in new things not only makes work more enjoyable, it makes your life feel longer.
