Practical Strategies for Tackling the Tasks You Dread
None of us is equally good at every aspect of our work, and not everything we do is equally enjoyable. We can try reframing the more trying parts of our day in terms of means to an ultimate end, but sometimes, even with a mindset adjustment, there are still jobs we dread—and that can make them difficult to finish effectively.
For these types of tasks, Jerry Weinberg offers some advice on how to manage them and increase your productivity.
Weinberg starts with the idea that the best way to be productive is to do what you love. When your work is engaging, it can seem effortless, and you can find yourself lost in a state of flow where you don’t notice the time passing. While that’s ideal, not all of us have work that is completely engaging; even if you enjoy your mission, you may still have tasks that seem onerous.
You can try to reframe the tasks as steps toward an appealing goal. There are many apps that attempt to keep you motivated in your progress toward a target.
But changing your outlook does not remove the unpleasant tasks from your to-do list. To mitigate these items, Weinberg suggests starting a not-to-do list. Name some of the tasks you don’t like to do that you think you might be able to live without. Then, experiment with dropping them. Organizations tend to keep processes in place even after their utility has passed, and following routines by habit, like the lamp lighter in The Little Prince, is neither rewarding nor valuable.
Some of the experiments Weinberg suggests are amusing, and some seem a bit risky, but they are worth considering. Can you get by with compiling a monthly report instead of a weekly one? Do they really need you in that meeting? Some of the tiresome tasks you’ve been performing may not even be adding any value.
If you are an experienced professional, this not-to-do list may well have items on it that are not only unrewarding, but perhaps unethical. Mark Chussil suggests also creating a never-do list to help you avoid ethical missteps. While you may not always be able to honor this list, it can help you identify when you are on the slippery slope to the unethical.
Finally, for tasks that seem mechanical, consider whether automation is an option. While it may seem easier to do things by hand in the short term, you can often quickly amortize the cost of automating a rote task, and you may even get a mental boost from the act of creating a new tool.
We all have some things we need to do that seem mundane, irksome, or even useless, and if we dwell on these things, our overall productivity will suffer. The next time you are faced with such a task, try to better understand how it moves you toward the end goal. Maybe you’ll come to appreciate the work—or maybe you’ll discover you don’t need to do it all.
