What They Don't Tell You About Your First Job
This past year I was fortunate enough to find a job relatively quickly after my graduation. Five months isn’t too much of a wait to get a job in the field I wanted and with “decent” pay. I’m grateful for the opportunity, really. But to be totally frank, it’s not that of a hard job. I mostly do small tasks like make copies, write up forms, do the social media. The more difficult stuff is often so far over the heads of everybody else that I never get hard deadlines. All the daily responsibilities though, I can breeze through relatively quickly. So it leaves me with a few hours everyday that I’m sitting there, looking around, contemplating life, scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, snack on something that’s hopefully not going to contribute to an early death or otherwise trying to look busy.
I understand the whole around the water cooler thing now. You literally want to be anywhere other than your desk even if that means interacting with people you don’t really like, so any excuse to get up and drink copious amounts of water or coffee you jump on the opportunity. If you work in an office with more than one other person you can kill maybe 15 minutes at a time just shooting the shit about that new TV series or the forms your boss made you fill out. But when you’re working at a job where the only other person in the office is your boss you’re trapped at your desk desperately trying to look busy while trying to maintain your sanity.
Everybody tells you to try and look good to your boss and work hard but it seems like in reality everybody procrastinates at work. My dad is the hardest working person I know and he admits to locking his office door and taking a nap every now and then. (I don’t think he reads these so keep that between us). I’m just curious how early in your job does the whole pretending to work thing kick in? A month? 2 months? A day? Like what are we talking here? I got a ton of questions. For the ordinary person, do you redline it the whole day? How much coffee do you drink? How many people take naps? Do you goof off? There are so many questions you have when you start your first full time job that never came up before, I'm just trying to find out how many other people are in this same position of, "why did nobody tell me this?!"
I know some people still in college probably think they've already learned these lessons because of their summer jobs or jobs in college and high school but there something different about your first "career" job. I’ve had those summer jobs, everything from painting, to remodeling home, to installing TVs and I never had these questions. That’s because there’s an end date. There’s a finite amount of time you’re going to be there, wherever there is. If you work in the summer, you get three months to try to earn as much money as possible. At school, 6 months and hopefully you can get your job back when you return in the fall. But a full-time, no end in sight job just feels different.
At a full-time job you don’t know when it’s going to be over or the specific day you’re leaving. Everybody has an idea but plans are fluid and often times don’t work out like you think. Without that deadline even the best of us start thinking, “well, I’m going to be here tomorrow so I can do it then.” But tomorrow starts turning into “next week”, “next month”, and soon your concept of time starts falling apart and you wake up 5 years later realizing you peaked in college. With no real end in sight, your motivation starts to dwindle and even if you actively try to get yourself back on track you have to try and not raise expectations to an unreasonable level so you can still have some free time during the day.
You have to try and find the balance between motivating yourself to actually accomplish something and giving yourself time to re-calibrate, while also trying to maintain your sanity. It’s a tightrope that you were never adequately prepared to walk. In the end all you can do is try to stay busy, get some work done and occasionally crawl under your desk and take a power nap or a good cry.