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 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 how do you deal with the fact that there are so many fun things to do but you just have to get this boring task done. You can’t just ditch it because your boss, your coworkers, your family, your friends, your lecturers or a committee you volunteered to help are relying on you. You can’t find anyone else to do it and its just got to be done now!

Here are a number of ideas that you can use to get past your next bout of boredom. I personally hate being bored so I use one or a combination of these things all the time.

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) Reduce the number of boring tasks you have to do in the first place by delegating them to someone else. You might not be able to get rid of everything that is boring, but if you give delegating a go you might be surprised at what you can let go. When it comes to personal tasks like ironing and cleaning you will need to pay someone, but at work you might even find some willing takers, and your good delegation skills could end up getting you a promotion!

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) 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 the boring task with an interesting one. This was the only way I could get myself to clean my room as a kid. I would set myself the goal of picking up and putting away 10 items, and in return I would allow myself to read just one page of whatever book I was into at the time. Even these days I sometimes alternate doing my paid work with reading the news.

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 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.

At Petra Smirnoff .com I have more information about living with Scanner/ Renaissance Soul Personality (multiple interests). I also share tips about Personal development.