What's the next action

The Friday 5ives: How to deal with tedious tasks

30 03 07 - 12:33 - Bookmark this post

I'm gonna try something new here. Every friday I'm gonna give you five tips, pointers, possibilities, tweaks for a single GTD-related or productivityproblem. I will call the The friday 5ives. I hope I can keep up with this series and I hope you can learn something from it. I already have a couple of items waiting, but we're gonna start with some tips for a moment we all have experienced. Working on tedious or mundane tasks...

Now matter how much fun GTD or doing your work is, we all have to do some tasks every now and again that we rather not do. Some parts of projects have tasks that are simply no fun at all. But you have to do them to get the job done. So what better way to do some hacking in your brain to make sure you get it all done. Here are five tips to get those mundane and tedious tasks done

1. Make fun of it: Just find some way to have fun with the task at hand. For example, recently I had to work on an Excel sheet where I had to enter lots of numbers in different cells and columns. Pretty stupid work but it had to be done. What I did is I entered those numbers with the numeric pad on my keyboard. And I found out that the number of keystrokes per number and cell could be done in a little beat. So instead of entering those numbers one by one in a dull way, I got that beat in my head and I entered the numbers "on the beat". I was flying!
2. Break it apart: A tedious task can sometimes be a large task. Try breaking it up in little parts where each part is small enough to get done without getting annoyed by it. 
3. Reward yourself: One of the best ways. Trick your mind! Make sure you can reward yourself when you get that laundry done. Chill out for a while or do something fun like writing part of a blogpost when you have finished doing the dishes. How do you think this post was put together? Rrrrrright.....
4. Delegate it: This may not work all the time, but you could try to have somebody else do the task for you. This might only work with the above option, rewarding that person...
5. Don't do it: This is the big thing. Decide that you don't do the task at hand. Can be easy to decide (those drawers can be cleaned up some other day) or a tough decision. But it's really up to you and yes it is an option.

Anyone had any experience with the above options? Some more ideas or thoughts about this?

Like this article? Subscribe to the RSS feed! Used tags: do_it, friday_5ives, hack, tasks

---

---

Hello,
I translate your article in french. I hope it’s not a problem .
The direct link is: http://life.betamaniac.com/2007/04/07/co..

Of course if you aren’t agree with that I can delete it.
Have a nice day,
Jonathan - 07 04 07 - 03:58

---

Since this weblog is no longer active, comments are disabled too. Please use a trackback from your own weblog if you want to comment on an article. Thank you.

Frank Meeuwsen