For the past few weeks I decided to change my working style. Up until now for almost 7 months I've been trying my best all the time, focusing on being fast, on being accurate, on finishing as much work as possible as quickly as I could, so I can always do more.
All that worked well for me. Last year I got a paycheck increase after around two months of working at this job, and this year I got another one halfway through the season. I guess my effort was seen by others and appreciated. But recently I realized something.
Because we've all been working so long, everyone is slowly starting to get too tired to put in proper effort into anything, including me. After doing almost nothing for so long but work, you start to lose interest. This affected me as well, and I found it harder and harder to do my best when I'm at my job.
In order to deal with this exhaustion and lost of interest I decided to change a bit the way I worked. I still wanted to keep doing the same amount of things, but I wanted to put less effort into everything. I thought, "who really cares how quickly things are being done? What matters is that the work is finished each day, not necessarily as fast as possible".
With that in mind, I began doing my job in a more relaxed way, taking my time with certain tasks and focusing more on getting things done well rather than quickly. Ironically, less effort somehow resulted in more work being done.
Although I stopped running around like crazy, trying to chop everything quickly, to carry heavy things from one place to another and to clean every surface I could see, I kept on making as much progress as before, but with less effort.
I realized fairly quickly that the only thing that changed was the fact that I currently finish work a bit later than before, but only by a few minutes, which no one really cares about. Whether I am done with everything at 11:30 or at 12:00, no one really cares, as long as the work gets done.
So basically, I ran around for most of the year, exhausting myself and living under the impression that I was making huge amounts of progress, for no reason. I could've worked at my own pace most of the time, doing what needed to be done comfortably, and still achieve, probably, the same results.
Nowadays work is much easier than before. Cleaning is more enjoyable, chopping and peeling vegetables is more relaxing, and I don't get home as tired as before after a day of work. I still need to go back to putting proper effort at times, when the amount of work goes up, but that rarely happens. I can handle everything just fine by taking my time.
So here's something you can try to think about: is the effort you are putting into things right now necessary? Could you achieve the same things even if you'd worked slower and in a more relaxed manner? If yes, then maybe taking it easy and giving yourself a break while remaining just as productive could allow you to better enjoy what you do and to still have energy when you finish work.