Did you ever get a mouthful of sand? Swimming in the ocean, face-planting on the beach, or sliding into home plate during a neighborhood baseball game as a kid? One second you’re fine; the next you’re crunching grit between your molars like a feral oyster. You spit, you swish, you spit again. Eventually the residue leaves your mouth – but it takes longer than you think.
That’s the taste a bad day at work leaves behind.
But what makes a bad day at work? (Or a good one, for that matter?) I, personally, know the feeling immediately: I get home (or leave my WFH office at the other end of the house) and I’m irritable, ravenous, and vaguely committed to watching strangers renovate kitchens until my brain powers down. I don’t have a story about the day so much as a mood. It’s the aftertaste.
For me, a bad day happens when:
- The cadence is off. There’s no rhythm…just …volume. A “quick sync” mutates, then collides with the next meeting, and before you know it you’ve spent more energy transitioning than doing
- There are far (FAR!) too many pancake stacks. Calls and meetings layer so tightly you can taste the syrup.
- There’s bad news. A project falls apart or HQ makes a decision you don’t agree with and can’t reverse. A colleague leaves which is somehow both understandable (yay for them!) – yet selfishly or personally inconvenient for you.
- You’ve been riding the conveyor belt of busywork. This is the purest distillation of the sand-in-your-teeth feeling and happens when you do things like shuttle documents to the correct folder so someone else can move them back. Perhaps you endlessly answer questions that contain their own answers or host the same-meetings-you’ve-hosted-for-5-years just to prove it was done, and the ritual was performed. It’s inertia dressed up as “work”.
None of these things are catastrophic…but all of them can be corrosive. Death – and defeat – by a thousand nudges.
So how to flip this? Truly, unless you are in a horrific and/or dysfunctional workplace, bad days can become good days (or at least decent) without a grand reinvention. You can, however, introduce some counterweights:
- define how you will make your time more meaningful
- unstack the pancakes (I do like that analogy!)
- say NO to busywork for the sake of “looking busy” (it’s not the same as useful)
Will there still be days that taste like sand? Of course. Work involves other people, changing conditions, and the occasional plot twist we never saw coming. But if you load up more and more good days, they can give you enough spark to carry on into ALL the tomorrows – with your teeth blissfully grit-free.
