If you’re anything like me you have a long list of things you’d like to do and you’re always busy working on things you enjoy. But then what happens when you’re 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 if you are itching to do something fun, but you just have to get this boring thing done because your boss, your coworkers, your family, your friends, your lecturers or a committee you volunteered to help are relying on you? It is not worth being antagonistic, you simply need to get the thing done.
Personally I react very badly to boredom so I know exactly where you’re coming from! As a result I have developed a number of coping mechanisms for getting things done so that I can go back to having fun. I apply these skills to job seeking, homework, downtime at work and the dreaded cleaning sprees.
1) Set yourself a task-based goal with a personal project as the reward. Put all your energy into your boring task immediately and do not stop until the task is finished. As soon as you are finished the boring task indulge in your personal project to your heart’s content.
2) Set yourself up to have fewer boring tasks to do in the first place by delegating the things you have to do that you find uninteresting. You might not be able to delegate away all of your boring tasks, but you can certainly make a good dent on them. For example, if you are really itching to work on some creative projects you could delegate your bookkeeping. If you want to spend your home time tracing your genealogy, hire someone else to clean the house.
3) Ask a friend to help or just to keep you company. Recently I was moving house and I found packing to be a really boring task. A friend offered to come visit a couple of times while I was packing. It was great! I think I packed more things during the time she was visiting than I did on my own for the whole rest of the week.
4) Split your tasks up into milestones so that you know how much you have done and how much work there is left. If you have to make twenty sales calls then logical milestones might be every forth or fifth phone call. You can feel good every time you hit a milestone.
5) Here’s an idea from Barbara Sher in Refuse to Choose. She suggests you can turn your task into part of an imaginary drama or storyline and amuse yourself silly with it! Pretend your task is part of a lead-up to an exciting adventure or mystery!
6) Crank up the music. When you’re doing something boring music can turn it from being a drag to being a disco! Experiment with different styles of music to see what works best in your circumstances. If you need to write, best to keep to non-vocal music.
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) Athletes use interval training to do short bursts of high energy activity. You can use it to do short bursts of getting boring things done! Just setup a timer for 5, 10 or 15 minutes and work as fast as you can during that time. Work out how long the total task will take you and slot the sprints in around your other activities. I use to do that when I worked from home as a telephone researcher when I was at uni. I would do six sprints a day of 20 minutes each whenever it was most convenient for me. I never had to put up with two-hour blocks of tedious phone calling, but still got the work done.
11) Instead of spending all your time doing a boring task, see if you can find a way to set up an automated system for getting the task done. If you succeed it will pay off both now and in the future. For example, I once took a job as a software tester and I hated to do the step-by-step regression tests because I found them to be incredibly boring. Instead, I added value to my workplace by learning how to use an automated testing software package, writing some scripts that would do the specific mouse clicks for me, and then wrote an instruction manual for the rest of the team, teaching them how to write their own automated test code in VBScript!
At Petra Smirnoff .com I have more information about living with an interest in everything. I also share tips about Getting things done.
