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 enjoy. 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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

5) Weave a fanciful and amusing storyline around your current task and pretend you are about to embark on an exciting adventure! I’ve never done this to help with boring tasks personally, but it is suggested by Barbara Sher in her book Refuse to Choose.

6) Listen to, or even sing along to music. Fast, loud pop is great 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 enjoy, but it is a welcome relief when I’m bored.

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.
Alternate your boring task with a fun one. This was the only way I could make myself clean my room as a kid (actually, I still use this technique for cleaning the house!). I would set myself the goal of picking up and putting away 10 items and then I would read just one page of whatever book I was into at the time. I would desperately want to read the next page, so then I would go and pick up and put away another 10 things.

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 spending all your time doing a boring 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 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, teaching them how to write their own automated test code in VBScript!

At Petra Smirnoff .com I have more information about living with an interest in everything. I also share tips about Career development.