While I’m still on the topic of Scanners and Renaissance Souls, it’s time to cover the issue of boredom. 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 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.
Here are a bunch of ideas. Most of them are my coping mechanisms that I have developed over time since I personally tend to react really badly to boredom.
- 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.
- 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 geneology, hire someone else to clean the house.
- 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.
- Split your task up into milestones so that you can tick off your percentage complete. If you know that you have to make twenty sales calls and you don’t feel like it, then you can feel good about your task being already 20% complete after the first four.
- Turn the task into part of an imaginative drama or storyline so that you can amuse yourself silly. Pretend your task is part of a lead-up to an exciting adventure! (This idea is from Barbara Sher in Refuse to Choose)
- 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 focussed 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
- Do two or more different boring tasks at the same time. The alternating of the two boring tasks might add enough variety to make you feel more interested than if you did only one task at a time.
- Alternate the boring task with an interesting one. This was the only way I could get myself to clean my room as a kid. I would set myself the goal of picking up and putting away 10 items, and in return I would allow myself to read just one page of whatever book I was into at the time. Even these days I sometimes alternate doing my paid work with reading the news.
- Get a stopwatch and make it a challenge for yourself. How quickly can you write that 2000 word essay? Turn on the stop-watch and find out! Then next time see if you can beat your own personal record
- Use a timer to section off short sprints. 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 whole task done. When I was at university I took a part-time job as a market research interviewer due to the flexible working arrangements, but I got really bored making all the calls as it would take sometimes a hundred calls to get one interview. The work was about 2 hours per day at any time I chose. Instead of doing it all at once which would have driven me crazy, I setup a twenty minute sprint every two hours around my uni homework.
- Instead of spending all your time doing a boring task, see if you can find a way to setup 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, teching them how to write their own automated test code in VBScript!
Can you think of more ways to relieve boredom? If so, write a comment and share it!
For relevant books to read, try Refuse to Choose! A revolutionary program for doing everything that you love by Barbara Sher
and The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One
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