I appreciate that thinking and talking about what you’ve done at work is not everyone’s idea of how to spend your hard-earned free time. I also appreciate that many people would not consider documenting their daily lives at work. Yet this is exactly what a growing number of people from around the world are doing.

Since the beginning of 2005 I have been on the look out for blogs that contain strong reference to what people do at work on a fairly regular basis, and before you ask, they are not people who openly bad-mouth their bosses and naming and shaming unscrupulous employers on the way to a high profile dismissal!

At present I have gathered together links to over 500 such blogs; quick examples of some of my favourites include a scientist who regularly posts comments and pictures from the South Pole, a call centre worker reporting on the mundane, repetitive and often insane nature of call centre work, a traffic warden waxing lyrically about the idiocy of drivers and targets set by management, and a rather cheeky look behind the scenes of an ambulance control dispatch unit.

To be honest there are far too many good work-related blogs to comment on and space and brevity prohibits the chance to promote blogs about working as a teacher, a doctor, a bus driver, a police officer, a sales assistant, a nurse. Never mind more unique blogs about working as a nightclub bouncer, a taxi driver, a stripper, and so on.

Crucially, as a person who takes significant interest in blogs about work, mainly because I believe they reveal a great deal about contemporary work that is missed out through other mediums set up to discuss work-related issues, I have also taken the time to find out why bloggers do what they do. I have done this by reading many of the blogs I link to, but I have also personally contacted bloggers and asked them why they go to such lengths, as many of you know how time consuming blogging can be.

In reading blogs and asking questions it is interesting to note that work-related blogs are not about what I have previously indicated – i.e. “bashing the boss”. Instead, what I found was people who are passionate about their work, yet until the advent of blogs lacked a means to express their feelings and experiences at work. In reality, people who blog about their work do so to set free some of their frustrations, yet other common reasons to blog about work also include the chance to write in a creative fashion, make sense of experiences, keep in touch with friends and family when working away from home, offer first-hand insights into the work that they do, using the blog as a means to develop their career (i.e. a reflective diary), educate the public about what they do, and in a way, as with blogging in general, make contact with like-minded people. 

The main attraction of blogging about work is that it isn’t a means to serve one particular end – it is to serve several ends and these are almost certainly going to differ depending on what type of person you are and what type of work you do. If this interests you then have a look at some of the blogs I have mentioned, perhaps join in the discussions put forward by the blogger, or maybe even start one yourself. However, it’ll probably pay to read up on how to blog safely about work if you already do or are about to start blogging about your work.

About the author:
James Richards blogs the site Work-related Blogs and News and teaches work-related subjects at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. During the past year or so James’s work has been commented on in a range of well-respected newspapers. When the time is “right” he hopes to undertake some serious research into blogging and other new forms of web-based communication technology.