Tune in or tune out

Greetings.

The question of why I hate the labour jobs less than I thought I would, and why I hated my office job far more than I ever expected has been running through my brain.  A tentative answer trickled through my brain yesterday as I was baking.

The problem is one of inputs.  Unless the subject in front of me is very engaging I will be quickly distracted. Office work, and the fine detailed but uninteresting work I did there did not hold my attention.  Failing to be enthralled lead to every distraction being more interesting that the job itself.  This is ignoring the fact that the job was also full of overly short micro tasks that I had not regimented into a manageable whole.

In the office setting I failed to tune out enough things to stay on track.  That is a normal failing of mine.  It is only a failing in the setting.  Yesterday I found myself working on three distinct breads at once, each with overlapping rising times and competing for the limited proofing and oven space in my house.  It was in juggling that small amount of regimented distraction that lead me to this.

Tuning out things is hard for me.  Tuning in on a few is easier.  And that is what I am getting out of the grunt work.  A distraction or a glance in the other direction reminds me of what I need to be doing next, or if I should be dodging out of the way of a speeding forklift.

So I enjoy a moderately busy environment, too busy and the poor input filters get overwhelmed and I flounder in overload based indecision.  So a job where being tuned in is a feature not a bug, and the task range is finite but not too fixed is something that at the moment makes me if not happy at least not miserable.  This frames better what I might want from a longer term job even if it does little to narrow down the scope.