According to the Association of Accounting Technicians, the average UK employee spends an average of 3,515 full days at work over the course of their lifetime. That’s almost an entire decade of your life spent solely in an office.

My intention in pointing this out is not to depress you – though I fear I may have done exactly that – but to amplify the importance of job satisfaction. Life is simply too short to spend dreading the moment your alarm clock sounds in the morning, signalling it’s time to drag yourself out of bed and to the office. Instead, your workplace should be somewhere you can’t wait to get back to, and your colleagues should be people who you truly feel you can be yourself around. If you aren’t happy, motivated, or engaged in your job anymore, the time may have come to move onto pastures new.

Here are some of the key signs that it’s time to find a new job.

There’s nothing worse than working in a toxic environment. Being made to feel totally insignificant yet completely overworked is exhausting, both mentally and physically. Your boss seems to take pleasure in criticising your work publicly, and encourages an unhealthy and unpleasant level of competition among employees, leading to no small amount of gossiping, backstabbing, and in-fighting. All in all, your office is a total nightmare.

When toxic culture is normalised at work, however, it’s easy to think that the grass won’t be greener, and that the world of work is inherently toxic. It’s not until you make the move to another company where staff are treated with respect, your mental health and wellbeing is prioritised, and colleagues are more like friends than rivals, that you realise just how much better things can be. So, if you find yourself working in a toxic environment, it’s time to make a move to somewhere you’ll be rewarded for your hard work and commitment, rather than waste your time being treated with contempt.

There’s no one who knows your potential better than you do. You know exactly what you’re capable of, and you don’t need anyone else to tell you. As such, it can be disappointing when you find yourself working for a business that is overly reliant on using key-performance indicators [KPIs] as a measure of success, instead of being given the freedom to work how you feel is most effective.

While it’s true that KPIs can be useful for junior members of staff who are just starting out, they can ultimately serve to stifle development, and actually create barriers to achieving results. For example, one of your KPIs may be to make a certain number of calls to customers over a specific period of time. While you may hit or even overachieve your monetary target, you could be let down by your KPI because you’ve only made 25 calls out of the 50 you were supposed to make. Of course, this only serves to provide a skewed perception of your success – after all, why does it matter that you only made 25 calls when you’ve tripled your billing? As such, employers who place too much stock in the value of KPIs may be losing sight of what actually matters.

What’s more, anyone can pick up a phone and dial out; what will set you apart from the rest is your ability to create meaningful relationships with your clients that are not only lasting, but rewarding also. These are the kinds of relationships that lead to real growth; but your efforts to forge them could be frustrated by the pressure you feel to hit your KPIs.

If you feel that KPIs are standing in your way of achieving meaningful results, you may be better served by moving to another firm where you’ll be given the liberty and respect to do things how you want to, rather than feeling that you constantly have to meet realistic or irrelevant targets.

You’ve worked your backside off to get a big project over the line, and your client is over the moon with what you’ve delivered for them. Now its time to have a catchup with your boss to discuss that payrise and promotion they promised they would give you if you achieved your goals. Only the conversation doesn’t go as well as you expected. ‘I think you’re nearly there, let’s just give it a few more months and review then’, they say. You’re a little miffed by the response, but you agree to your boss’ terms. Then, when it comes time to review again, your boss kicks the can down the road again, even though you’ve more than delivered on your side of the bargain by now.

This scenario will be a familiar one to many, I’m sure. The cold reality is that some bosses simply don’t want to pay you anymore than they have to, and are instead content to continue giving you just enough that they think will keep you happy. Don’t be fooled then when the goalposts keep getting moved further and further away. Those kinds of bosses will do anything they can to avoid having to reward you for your hard work, and if they keep telling you that a payrise and promotion are just around the corner, you can easily be taken in by this.

If your boss continuously promises the world but fails to deliver on their pledges, you need to stop wasting your time and leave. Everyone wants to feel that their efforts are recognised and will be rewarded. By staying at a firm where you’ve already hit the ceiling on what can be accomplished, it’s time to start updating your CV, and preparing to hand in your notice.

When the time finally comes to put your feet up and retire, you don’t want to look back on a career of ‘what ifs’ and squandered opportunities. ‘If only I had left that job with that awful company sooner, I wouldn’t have been miserable for years’. ‘If only I had believed in myself more, I could’ve fulfilled my potential and been more successful’.

Don’t let this happen to you. Grab your career by the horns right now and steer it in whichever direction you want. While you might spend so much of your life at work, you don’t want to waste that time being unhappy. Life really is too short for all that, so put yourself first and find a job that works for you. After all, who said work can’t be fun?