Hey, guys. It's Chelsea from The Financial Diet, and this week's video is sponsored by monday.com. And we talk a lot about how to optimize our work lives here at TFD, whether it's about negotiating for a raise or a higher starting salary, or maximizing productivity so that you can actually leave your work behind when 5 o'clock hits. But one thing that we don't touch on quite as much here at TFD is how to know when it's time to make a serious change at work. Whether that means moving it totally on to a different company or industry, moving up within your own organization, or totally revamping your workflow. So let's talk about it now with these nine important signs that you've outgrown your job.

 Number 1, and perhaps in many ways, the most common is that your role isn't evolving. It is fair to expect your role to evolve over time, especially if you're someone who proves capable of self managing and more than handling all of your responsibilities. But sometimes in an organization, there simply isn't anywhere for you to move up or your managers will intentionally keep you in a position because you are so good at it. And if they don't know that you're interested in moving up the ladder in any capacity, they may not be particularly motivated to see that you do. If you don't feel comfortable staying long term in the exact role and workflow you're currently in, you need to make sure that that's known to at least give the opportunity to those who are in charge to help you move up to the role that's right for you, or at least to make sure that your current role is evolving with your skills and proficiencies. But if there aren't opportunities for growth or the people leading you aren't necessarily motivated to work with you to make that happen, that's probably a big sign that this role and moreover this company isn't the right one for you anymore, and that's when it's time to look for something externally. Now, to be clear, when it comes to a role evolving, we're not talking about your role growing above and beyond what you were initially asked to do while still being paid the same and expected to accomplish everything in the same amount of hours. That in and of itself is a big problem, which we'll get into in some later points. I'm talking about doing an excellent job at a given role year after year and not seeing yourself move up in any capacity or at least seeing the role be expanded and its compensation adjusted to accommodate what you're doing with it.

Number 2 is that your workflow isn't thoughtful or intuitive. Sometimes, outgrowing your job means noticing the parts of your day and your workflow that are harder than they need to be. If you're constantly unsure of what you personally are responsible for or are waiting on deliverables from other people or have no consistent way to organize your work, it's time to put some workflow management in place, and that's where money.com Work OS comes in. If you're looking to make your own workflow more effective and more transparent, money.com Work OS is the perfect platform for every field, including product management, marketing teams, sales and CRM, software development, and more. It's totally flexible, where you can easily create or customize any solutions your team needs to run any aspect of your work. Our COO Annie finds it very useful for managing all of these different accounts. As you can see, her dashboard is customized for the project she's working on, which you can do with yours. It simplifies planning, collaborating, and organizing across different teams and hierarchies. And with all your work in one place, monday.com ensures that you never forget a deadline or have to find key details for a project lost in a lengthy email thread. With every team members work out in the open, it's always clear who is responsible for what, eliminating confusion in your workday. So click the link in our description and access our customizable habit tracking template on monday.com and take better control of your work life today.

Number 3 is that you've taken on the bulk of your boss's responsibilities. Now, this is in contrast to point 1, wherein in your role is incredibly stagnant and repetitive and not evolving or eventually moving up in terms of your various skills and competencies. This is when your job is evolving frankly too much in becoming essentially your boss's job on top of your own. You've probably heard from bosses and CEOs and linked influencers and all of that sort of motley crew of individuals about things like optimizing your workflow, i.e. optimizing your workflow via offloading an enormous amount of your tasks and responsibilities onto some unpaid assistant. Check out the cringey Twitter thread in our description where a CEO makes the mistake of describing just that in detail and gets flamed to all hell by anyone with any sense of decency. Now, yes, a lot of more junior roles can and do require a lot of interface and reporting to a manager. But if you feel that your job has crossed the line into simply absorbing a lot of your manager's tasks or responsibilities, that's a really bad sign. Using that awful thread, where that CEO talks about everything she pawned off on to her assistant who doesn't even live in the country so who knows what kind of work/labor regulations are going on there. It's easy to pick out in examples like that what are things that are obviously meant for the position in question, things like managing a CEOs inbox is a good example of something that is expected and for an assistant. But acting as a sales lead, for example, is not. If it sounds familiar to you that you're constantly seeing your work grow to include all of the work your boss should be doing, that's a big red flag that, not only have you outgrown your role, but you might be in a bit of a toxic work environment. And a good thing to remember if you are looking to move out to a new job after an experience like this is when you're looking for your next job, don't base your search entirely on the title you had before. Remember the fact that you were constantly working above and beyond that title and look to things that are more suited to the way above and beyond experience you were having before.

Now number 4 is more lateral, and that's just that you've absorbed someone else's work. Now, it's one thing and arguably more difficult to navigate when it's your direct boss' work that's been unloaded onto you slowly over time. But another big problem that people often face at their job is employers not hiring when they need to. So often you can absorb the work of another employee who has quit or been laid off or simply hasn't been hired yet. If you find yourself simply not able to get all of your work done in the allotted time and notice that a lot of the work you're being asked to do goes well above and beyond what was in your initial job description, that is a clear sign that your company is under staffed, and if you do want to stay at this job it is one of the best possible times to talk about a title change and/or a salary increase, because not only have you clearly earned it, but obviously your employers are a bit over a barrel in terms of being understaffed. But if either you're not ready to have that conversation or they're not ready to increase anything about your compensation, you have to be very candid with your employers about what you can and can't do. Try this script from the advice blogger Ask a Manager. I can do A and B, but not C. Or if C is really important, I would want to move A off my plate to make room for it. Alternatively, I can act as an advisor to Jane on C, but I can't do the work of C myself if I'm also doing A and B. As long as you're transparent about what you can and can't do, that is the most that any employer can ask of you. It's up to them to figure out how to make it work.

 Number 5 is your often running into the same problems or complications. Now, this could be something as serious as repeated complaints to HR about a particular dynamic or something as simple and common as reaching the same bottleneck on certain workflows or projects. And to be fair, things like the latter can more easily be fixed, but do make sure that, when you identify that you are running into specific problems repeatedly, that you bring it up to the manager or the person in charge of helping to find a solution as soon as possible. You don't want to start falling victim to some of those inconsistencies or challenges or complications and then become part of the problem yourself by not working to solve it or to be blamed retroactively for things going wrong because of pre-existing problems you fell into. It could be that the team is short an employee or that certain people are no longer in the right roles or you're missing key tools or elements of the process. No matter what it is, though, it's important to remember that a problem will happen now and again, but the same problems happening over and over again is not a good sign for the dynamic. And do remember that in almost every job one of the elements that distinguishes any employee above and beyond is the ability to recognize problems and find-- or at least help find-- proactive solutions to them before others do. If you can manage to find and solve a problem before your manager has to get involved, that's an even bigger win. And things like that are very great to bring up at your performance review in your so-called success folder that we love to talk about having when it comes to advocating for yourself.

Number 6 is that you constantly have free time during work hours. Now, there's a difference between being happy and not over-stressed at a job and being bored out of your mind. If you find yourself coasting, that is a sign that the job is A, no longer fulfilling to you, and B is likely not to change unless you take an initiative. Now, don't get me wrong. If you're interested in keeping a job where you basically have several free hours a day to just cruise the internet and don't really care about possibly evolving in that job or getting something better down the road and are happy to have that extraordinary amount of free time at your desk every day, good on you. That's amazing. Live, laugh, love. I am not going to take that from you. But if you are looking to move into something that's a bit more challenging, fulfilling, or possibly furthering you in your ultimate career goals, take this quote from an article in Fast Company. "We get energized by growing, just like that feeling of feeling a little bit uncomfortable as we're learning. And if we find that we're just coasting through the job and we're not really being stretched, then we probably have captured what the job has to offer in terms of knowledge, competencies, and skills." There are a lot of paths to take when it comes to quote, unquote "solving" this problem and it depends on whether or not you want to stay in the organization or maybe even the job. But if you do want to find a way for your job to be more fulfilling and proactive at your current employer, do keep in mind that revealing yourself as having such amazing amounts of free time is a bit of a risky proposition, because they could just dump a lot more work on your plate. So do make sure that when you have a conversation with your manager about your days not being quite as filled with work as they may be could be that you have a proactive next step in terms of what you want to do with that time or what you see doing with that role. If you let that gap just be exposed, it's likely going to be filled with more work you don't like.

Number 7 is that your co-workers primarily bitch about work when you're together. Now, obviously, venting with co-workers from time to time is completely natural and something that's basically unavoidable, especially when it comes to external third parties that you work with, who you basically have no control over and everyone forms a little defensive team against. Honestly, complaining about things like terrible clients can be good for morale every now and again. But if your coworkers are frequently complaining to each other, they're complaining about internal dynamics or undermining each other behind their backs or frequently talking about the same problems over and over, that's probably more indicative of a toxic workplace. Having been at a workplace that was exactly that, I can say that in the moment there was something a little cathartic about being able to constantly bitch with my colleagues about what was objectively a terrible work environment, but looking back, being kept in that circle of sort of faux camaraderie with the other people who just happened to be in the same shitty job only serve to keep me in that job much longer than I should have been and kept me from realizing that what might have made for some fun complaining time ultimately represented a huge drain on my mental health and my professional prospects. A workplace full of coworkers who just like to bitch is never a good sign.

Number 8 is that your ideas are frequently shot down. If you're getting used to frequently expending mental and emotional energy on ideas that just continually get shot down, it's probably worth asking yourself why. And in general, there are really two possibilities. There the ideas that you're bringing to the table are not valuable or well thought out, in which case there might be a big discrepancy between the role you're in and the role you're suited for or the kind of information that you're receiving on the job or it could be that you have employers or colleagues who are just simply not interested in your ideas, whether it's yours or someone else's. There are frequently a lot of employers who are simply resistant to change and approach a path of least possible resistance to basically everything, meaning that anyone who even attempts to improve a system or rethink a workflow is going to be ostracized or at best ignored. If you're the kind of person who thinks critically about how to improve the work that you're in and how to do various elements of that work in a smarter and more effective way and that is frequently getting shot down, it's time to ask yourself why that might be and consider that you might want to move toward an organization or at least a role within your organization where that kind of idea having is rewarded and appreciated.

Number 9 is a bit of a controversial one maybe but one that I think also deserves mention and that is that you feel a little too emotionally attached to your work. Now, it is important to be invested in doing a good job in the work that you do and caring about the product and wanting to treat the people that you work within a kind and empathetic manner. Showing a level of care is important and not showing a level of care with either what you do or who you work with is going to be a big red flag for any employer. But if you find yourself a little too invested in the job, meaning things like you're not able to emotionally or mentally disconnect at the end of the day or you're frequently finding yourself getting a very worked up about things over which you may not have control or you're constantly working beyond hours that you're required to in order to either get ahead or soothe your own anxiety, that is a sign that whether externally imposed or simply from your own perspective, you are just a little bit too involved emotionally in your work. Having a work life balance is incredibly important, and when you are able to keep those firm boundaries around what is work and what is personal time, that still allows for a very high level of care in your work and arguably allows you to be better positioned to actually demonstrate that care through very high quality work and communication. We're often inundated with these maxims about loving what you do, and it's true that deriving passion and fulfillment from your work is a great thing if possible. But let's be clear. Your co-workers are not your family, and honestly employers who use that sort of language are a bit of a red flag, and being overly emotionally invested in your work to the point that it blurs your boundaries is not a sign that you love your job, it's a sign that you have trouble keeping boundaries. And whether it's the employer who is fostering this environment, the job itself, which is overwhelming and causing an anxiety loop or simply your own habits with regards to this job, it's time to rethink your role within the organization and possibly the organization itself. Because although it can be a bit addictive to be in a job that you feel so overly dedicated to, it's ultimately not sustainable and can lead easily to things like burnout.

Ultimately, I think it's fair to say that you shouldn't love your job. Liking it a lot is good, but I wouldn't go much past that. And no matter where you are in your current role, if you are looking to improve your workflow and productivity, I highly recommend you click the link in our description to access our customizable habit tracking template on monday.com and take better control of your work life today. And as always, guys, thank you for watching and don't forget to hit the Subscribe button and to come back every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday for new and awesome videos. Goodbye.