It's kind of like that Crosby Stills Nash and Young song "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with", but instead of love, substitute job.

Jeremy Caplan of TIME Magazine has a handy dandy guide to "job-crafting" that will (hopefully) turn the job you hate into a better one. For example:

Step 2: Diagram Your Day
To lay the groundwork for change, job-crafting participants assemble diagrams detailing their workday activities. The first objective is to develop new insights about what you actually do at work. Then you can dream up fresh ways to integrate what the job-crafting exercise calls your "strengths, motives and passions" into your daily routine. You convert task lists into flexible building blocks. The end result is an "after" diagram that can serve as a map for specific changes.

Ina Lockau-Vogel, a management consultant who participated in a recent job-crafting workshop, says the exercise helped her adjust her priorities. "Before, I would spend so much time reacting to requests and focusing on urgent tasks that I never had time to address the real important issues." As part of the job-crafting process, she decided on a strategy for delegating and outsourcing more of her administrative responsibilities.

In contrast to business tomes that counsel managers to influence workers through incentives, job-crafting focuses on what employees themselves can do to re-envision and adjust what they do every day. Given that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it now takes the average job seeker more than six months to find a new position, it's crucial to make the most of the job you've got.

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