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What Do You Do About Boredom? |
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Written by Petra Smirnoff
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Wednesday, 28 July 2010 07:50 |
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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.
by PetraSmirnoff
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.
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 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) 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 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) 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) 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.
8) Alternate the boring task with an interesting one. As a kid, this was the only way I could get myself to clean my bedroom. I made a pact with myself that if I picked up and put away 10 items I would allow myself to read one page of my book. Then once I had read one page I would have to go and pick up another 10 items before getting to read the next page. It worked! I still do this today when it comes to tidying the house.
9) Use a stopwatch to time how long you take. How quickly can you write an essay or complete a report? Turn on the stopwatch and find out! Then next time you have to do the same thing, see if you can beat your 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.
About the Author:
At Petra Smirnoff .com I have more information about living with an interest in everything. I also share tips about Getting things done. |
