Being excited by many different things has a corollary effect of experiencing insane boredom when you’re not doing the things you feel passionate about. But while you can fill up your time with varied and interesting projects, there will always be times when you are stuck doing something you don’t want to do. People who get very passionately excited also tend to get very frustratingly bored if being held back from what they want to do.
So what do you do when you absolutely have to knuckle down because your boss, your coworkers, your family, your friends, your lecturers or a committee you volunteered to help are relying on you and you’re about to miss the deadline if you leave it any longer. Its not worth being a rebel, you’ve just got to get it done.
Here are a number of ideas that you can use to get past your next bout of boredom. I personally hate being bored so I use one or a combination of these things all the time.
1) Set yourself a specific task to complete with a reward at the end. Once you are clear about what the task entails, put all your energy into the boring task immediately and do not stop until the task is finished. As soon as you are finished enjoy your reward without any guilt or distraction.
2) Reduce the number of boring tasks you have to do in the first place by delegating them to someone else. You might not be able to get rid of everything that is boring, but if you give delegating a go you might be surprised at what you can let go. When it comes to personal tasks like ironing and cleaning you will need to pay someone, but at work you might even find some willing takers, and your good delegation skills could end up getting you a promotion!
3) Ask a friend to help or just keep you company. Recently I was moving house and a friend offered to come visit while I was packing. Well that was the best idea ever! I think I packed more things during the couple of hours on the two nights that she visited than I did on my own for the whole rest of the week.
4) Split your task up into milestones so that you can measure your percentage complete. If you know that you have to make twenty sales calls, or write a three thousand word essay, you have numbers that you can measure against. If feels good to make four calls and know that you’re 20% done, or hit word count after writing a couple more paragraphs.
5) Weave a fanciful and amusing storyline around your current task and pretend you are about to embark on an exciting adventure! I’ve never done this to help with boring tasks personally, but it is suggested by Barbara Sher in her book Refuse to Choose.
6) Sing or listen to music. While I can’t stand to listen to music while I’m in the flow of a task I really love (because my favourite tasks usually involve focused thinking), it can be a relief when doing something that’s a drag. Singing is even better, but listening with discrete earphones is more appropriate at work
7) If you have two boring tasks to do one after the other, why not try doing the both at the same time? The switching between the two boring tasks might add enough variety to make the combination interesting.
Alternate your boring task with a fun one. This was the only way I could make myself clean my room as a kid (actually, I still use this technique for cleaning the house!). I would set myself the goal of picking up and putting away 10 items and then I would read just one page of whatever book I was into at the time. I would desperately want to read the next page, so then I would go and pick up and put away another 10 things.
9) Get a stopwatch and make it a challenge for yourself. How quickly can you write that 2000 word essay? Turn on the stopwatch and find out! Then next time see if you can beat your own personal record
10) Use a timer to section off short sprints as though you were interval training. Set the timer for 5, 10 or 15 minutes and work as fast as you can during that time. Plan your day so that you can space out enough short sprints to get the task done. I used this method when I took a job as a work-from-home telephone market researcher during my university studies. I had about two hours per day of calls to do, but I could handle only 20 minutes at a time. I spaced the phonecalls at intervals during my day around my uni homework and that kept me on track.
11) Instead of wasting your time doing the same task repeatedly, see if you can find a way to set up an automated system for getting the task done. This is particularly the case with anything done on the computer. For example, when I started my career in IT I took a job as a software tester, but then I realised that I hated testing because I found the step-by-step regression tests to be particularly tedious. To make the task better, I learned how to use an automated testing software package and wrote some scripts that would do the specific mouse clicks for me. I topped it off by writing an instruction manual to teach the other members on my team how to do it too.
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