What Do You Do When You Get Bored?
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 delight in. 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 dull 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 number of thoughts that you can use to get past your next bout of boredom. I personally despise being bored so I use one or a combination of these things all the time.
1) Rather than setting a time-based goal, set a task based goal and use a personal scheme as the reward. Place all your energy into your dull task and do not stop until the task is finished. If you can get into 'the zone' you might even delight in it!
2) Set things up so that you've got fewer dull things to do in the first place. Whenever you find yourself getting bored, make a note of what the task is and then find a way to delegate it to someone else. While you might not be able to get rid of everything that is dull due to financial constraints, you can make a excellent dent by getting rid of the most dull tasks first. If the things you despise to do are quite common, like cleaning the house and bookkeeping for example, then there are plenty of people competing to offer you excellent services.
3) Question a friend to help or just to keep you company. Recently I was moving house and I found packing to be a really dull task. A friend offered to come visit a couple of times while I was packing. It was fantastic! I reckon 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 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 excellent to make four calls and know that you're 20% done, or hit word count after writing a couple more paragraphs.
5) 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 thought is from Barbara Sher in Refuse to Choose).
6) Listen to, or even sing along to music. Quick, loud pop is fantastic for tedious physical tasks, whereas classical might be better if you have to concentrate. I don't like music at all for focused tasks that I delight in, but it is a welcome relief when I'm bored.
7) If you have two dull tasks to do one after the other, why not try doing the both at the same time? The switching between the two dull tasks might add enough variety to make the combination appealing.
Every second the dull task with an appealing 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 place 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) Time yourself with a stopwatch to see how long you take to get the job done. Then next time the same job comes around, make it a game - work hard to beat your personal best speed. Soon you'll be getting it done in a flash.
10) Use a timer to part off small sprints. Set the timer for 5, 10 or 15 minutes and work as quick as you can during that time. Plot your day so that you can space out enough small 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 set up a twenty minute sprint every two hours around my uni homework.
11) Instead of costs all your time doing a dull 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 despised to do the step-by-step regression tests because I found them to be incredibly dull. 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 reviews and information about Barbara Sher's Refuse to Choose book. I also share tips about Personal enhancement.
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