4 ways to make work fun

I had fun creating this image in Ideogram, an AI image-generation app that can actually deliver legible text.

So many of us now spend big portions of our working lives at home, but we’ve brought the office home with us — including a whole lot of outdated ideas about what’s professional or what work is supposed to look or feel like.

But there is nothing unprofessional about having fun at work—whether you are working at home, or at an office! Here’s how to bring more fun into your daily working life, so that work becomes a way you renew your energy as well as a way you expend it.

Play with your colleagues.

You can make meetings fun without making them longer. Forgo the background blur and let your colleagues see you in your natural habitat, so they can comment on your quirky collectibles. Get yourself a word of the day calendar and challenge yourself to work it into conversation. Make room for a quip about something funny in a report or dataset. It’s all about letting go of the idea that being “professional” means turning off your personality, and instead engaging with the same joy and spontaneity you’d bring to a conversation with friends.