Tackling Tedium: How I Try to Make the Mundane Manageable
“Most work is boring, but focusing is incredibly meditative.”
-Adam Savage
There’s a dirty little secret about work that very few people acknowledge — all jobs have tedious parts at least some of the time.
The notion of the dream job has become so popular that sometimes we forget that work is, well work. If we go into work expecting it all to be fun, sunshine, and rainbows we’ll be disappointed. It turns out, regardless of our occupation, many of our tasks will be tedious. Of course, what constitutes tedium varies by person, but all jobs will have necessary aspects we find boring.
Boring tasks themselves aren’t the issue. Especially when we’re young and inexperienced, it’s tempting to blame the task itself. I’m guilty of this myself. We may be tempted to think this is only a problem of entry-level work. When we climb the ladder, surely we’ll get more interesting tasks and have a passion for our work.
Based on my observations and conversations with people in upper management, this doesn’t seem to be the case. They seem to have the same problem, only with additional responsibility and expectations due to their seniority. Escape from tedious toil seems impossible.
If we’re banking on the work to become better and save us from our boredom, we’re waiting on the impossible. Believing we’ll eventually reach a place in work where we are never bored ignores human biology — we are wired for boredom.
If we step back from biologically based arguments, there’s still a deep reason we feel bored and sad with tedious tasks. Our response to necessary tedium based on warped expectations is responsible for our problems.
We don’t feel pain or sadness because of a boring task. Instead, we feel these emotions because of our misguided expectation that work should always be fulfilling and compelling.
Simply telling ourselves boring tasks are a necessary evil of work rarely makes us feel better. As humans, we’re hardwired to chase the shiny, novel thing. Work, often grounded in routines, is usually anything but this.
Entry-level positions are often the epitome of repetitive tasks. Their repetitive nature is partly because people higher-up want to delegate away as many tedious tasks as possible, and partly because those routines help us build competence and a wider understanding.
Thankfully, there are some tricks and tips we can apply to make the inevitably boring or mundane parts of our work more enjoyable.
Gamification
I loved video games as a child. I easily lost hours, if not days, to expertly crafted fantasy worlds. Upon reflection, a lot of tasks in these games were repetitive, but I didn’t get bored with them. For anyone unfamiliar with games, you often spend a lot of time killing enemies which look similar, harvesting the same resources, or traversing terrain with similar mechanics.
Despite the apparent tedium on the surface, video games were able to get me to enjoy performing the same, repetitive actions because they leveraged human psychology.
We love to see that we’re making progress towards clear, concrete goals and improving over time. Video games make both of these abundantly clear. When we kill mobs we gain experience towards the next level. When we accomplish feats, we are rewarded with achievements.
Upon ranking up, we usually acquire a shiny new object or a bad-ass new skill. In multiplayer games, we can compete to top the leaderboards. Our competition to best other players and ourselves is infectious and in line with our basic needs.
Video games make the pathway to mastery clear. We’re able to see the metrics we’re measured against and the improvements we’re making towards these goals. Clearly, video games have found a way to effectively tap into our reward systems and we can learn from them.
Make Progression Clear
Whether we’re working an office job or a receiving, there are ways to make our progress at work clear. Two common metrics include time to complete a task and customer satisfaction scores.
Customer satisfaction scores are always an option. Whether it’s the satisfaction of the community partners we work with, our customers, or our boss. Any of these are viable metrics for assessment and give us a snapshot of how effectively we’re doing your job.
Timing is the second way. For me, time is the more powerful metric. I love setting a goal, giving my all, and finding a way to top my previous best effort. Time is a clean, easily quantifiable metric. If you’re a more concrete thinker like me, then you love things which can be quantified. We can’t help it, it’s the way our brains understand the world.
Combining the satisfaction scores and timing is a good way to balance quantitative and qualitative measures. When leveraged together, they’re able to give us a good pulse on how we’re currently doing in a given role.
If our time to complete a task is decreasing while our satisfaction scores are staying consistent or improving, then we know we’re on the right track to mastery. Visually seeing this progression is motivating and may even help us start to make peace with the tasks we currently dread.
On our road to mastery, we can look at our own past performance, the performance of other people in our field, or both. Any of these approaches can allow us to foster competition and develop the drive to become better.
Create Competition
Competition can take two forms, either internally driven or externally driven. Both are useful for different reasons, although you may not always be able to do both.
Almost always, you can compete against yourself in accomplishing boring tasks. One simple way to do this is to time yourself. If it usually takes you about an hour to enter a stack of data, see if you can do it in 55 minutes.
Doing this does two things. Firstly, it turns the chore into a game. Albeit, not a super entertaining game, but a game nevertheless. Playing a game of our own design allows us to change the locus of control from external to internal.
Instead of being purely a management dictated task, we now have a stake. Our goal is to complete the assigned task in a little faster than normal.
When we change our focus from “why do I have to do this” to “how can I do this task better” we encounter the second benefit of turning the task into a competition. Before, we were focused on the wider why and larger existential questions which can give us anxiety or angst.
Now, when we focus on the task at hand, we quiet our mind and get to work. It’s almost meditative in a way, we’re not concerned with past or future, just what’s right in front of us. Of course, we should be cognizant of the task we’re doing and why, but we don’t necessarily have to think about these things when we’re simply trying to do the work.
Many company environments, especially in for-profit, actively encourage competition. They post-performance scores, quotas, etc. While it’s easy to take this too far and turn people into assholes, especially when compensation is directly tied to performance, there is value in engaging in friendly competition.
In my experience, some of my biggest moments of growth came through friendly competition. When I was trying to get better at racquetball, I purposefully played with friends who were better than me and wanted to win.
Placing myself in that environment forced me to step-up quickly and improve my game so I could keep up. For the first couple of months, I couldn’t take a single game. Eventually, I was able to take a game off them, and at long last a full match.
Not only did I feel accomplished with something well earned, but they also continued to grow in the process. When we created an environment of friendly competition, we both prospered and became better than we were.
Incentivize Milestones
Discipline and willpower, although great, are far from bulletproof. While these two traits are key to being successful at whatever we do, they are hard to curate, and if you’re like me, aren’t the most dependable.
In games, harder fights, like boss battles, are often incentivized by the promise of treasure and new skills after conquering the challenge. We want the achievement/shiny new in-game perk, so we strive diligently towards beating the boss.
We can take a similar approach to our own work. As we spend more time in a job and slowly become better at the tasks we are assigned, we start to see areas for improvement. We recognize we can actually do a task faster or achieve more sales if we tweak something.
From this, we can usually create milestones for ourselves. For example, we know if we’re going to finish entering all the data on time, we need to have a certain number of pages done by mid-day.
Sometimes, going through this slog is hard on its own, especially if there are other factors outside of work. These are the cases where a little incentive can help. Let’s say today is a big day and we need to deliver. We know what pace we need to maintain to get the job done.
If we set up a particularly alluring reward for a halfway mark, say a nice lunch from our favorite spot, we’re more inclined to get it done. We want the shiny reward for a task completed, so we’re willing to endure the slog for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Unfortunately, while usually effective, there are times, regardless of how alluring a reward is, it won’t motivate us to move. Sometimes, we need to leverage another technique because depending on motivation alone is a recipe for disaster.
Reframe the Task
As we grow older, we have an unfortunate tendency to take life too seriously. Returning to a more childlike view of the world and incorporating fun with the mandatory mundanity of life is sometimes our best play. A kind of cute way to do this is to reframe the task or make it into something other than it actually is.
An example could be when we inevitably courier certain documents. One way to think of that task is we’re simply running to Karen’s office with some legal document only a handful of people actually care about.
While true, this is boring, so let’s spice it up!
Instead of running to Karen’s office with a boring legal document, we’re hand delivering a peace treaty between two opposing factions who have been at war for the last century. If you think this is stupid, then either A, you’re not geeky enough to read most of my stuff, or B, that exact attitude is part of the problem if you’re unhappy at work.
Reframing can also be less geeky — and less fun. Sometimes, if we look at a task as a bridge to let us do cool shit later, we’re more able to accept the momentary discomfort. It’s still not great, but instead of being a burden on us, the work is now an ally in our quest for better work.
Despite our best effort, sometimes all the games and tricks we try to play fail. While we should be trying to take active control of our life and perspective, there are times where this approach doesn’t work. So, instead of tricking ourselves, we must make peace with the current reality.
Acceptance of Tedium
Tedium itself is neither good nor bad. We assign the meaning of good or bad because good and bad are our subjective interpretations. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, there is no way to easily incentivize, reframe, or gamify a task. When these instances occur, we have two choices.
Our first choice is to be miserable. We can lament our situation and make our mood worse. An unintended consequence of this is that we often affect our co-workers’ mood as well when we do this.
Misery may love company, but most people do not love misery. If we find ourselves falling into this trap too often, counter-productive things will happen. Co-workers will only interact with us when they have to.
Outside mandatory interactions, they’ll likely stay the hell away from us armed with a no-negativity baseball bat.
Misery also makes it more likely we’ll underperform at work. Our brains are optimized to do their best work when they are happy. If we give into a frequent state of misery, we’ll perform suboptimally.
When we under perform we’re not likely to get new, more interesting tasks. Instead, if we’re able to keep our jobs at all, we’ll be given the same task with the hopes our performance will improve.
Clearly, becoming miserable is an undesirable option. So, what is the second choice when we face tedium we can’t game away? We simply accept the tedium as the current state of things.
Acceptance isn’t easy, but it’s effective. Although our current task is tedious, being fine with the tedium means it loses a lot of its power over us. Our acceptance lets us diminish the incessant mental chattering that comes with feeling bored and underappreciated.
Reduced mental chatter allows us to focus on the work and each small element of it. Counterintuitively, we can beat tedium by accepting it.
Through acceptance, our focus shifts back to work. A consequence of focusing solely on what’s in front of us, we slowly improve our abilities and gain a deep-seated fulfillment.
Gratitude
The last way to beat tedium is by being thankful we have work to do at all, and the work is so easy we call it tedious. On its face, this suggestion may seem flippant or callous but hear me out.
It’s easy for us to get caught in the daily minutia of our lives and forget we’re the global 1% throughout history. If we’re in a position to be lamenting how boring our work is, we’ve probably already won many of the lotteries of life.
Boredom itself is a luxury. It’s more likely people who are bored have a majority of their basic needs met and live in the global north. When we find ourselves despairing at being bored working in a fairly safe place, we should remind ourselves billions of people would give anything to trade places.
To be clear, I’m not trying to incite guilt. Feeling bored is valid and a common human experience. I offer this perspective because sometimes stepping outside of our current situation allows us to see things in a new light.
Of course, gratitude is hard to cultivate and even harder to maintain but we can foster it more often with continual practice. Eventually, if we practice this intentional gratitude, it will spread to other areas of our life.
Gratitude is last because it’s more difficult, but pays the highest dividends. Instead of a transient solution consistently practiced gratitude has more permanence and affects us beyond the work.
Wrapping up
Tedium isn’t fun, but it’s an inevitable and valuable part of our lives. With tedium, we are able to learn a few things about ourselves and the world around us. One of the most important lessons tedium teaches us is how we handle adversity.
If we want to throw in the towel, find something more entertaining, and numb our pain when we’re bored, then it’s likely we’ll also follow this behavior with other types of pain. Especially if our response to boredom (i.e. mental anguish) is to run away, we slowly engrain this habit.
On the other hand, if we find a way to push through or even lean into our boredom, then this too will slowly become a habit. When we’re studying for something or working on a project that’s important to us, we’ll slowly learn that we’re capable of more than we imagine.
In some ways, facing tedium is one of the safest and easiest testing grounds for us to practice our response to adversity. Encountering resistance is unavoidable if we want to live a life worth living. The actions we take when encountering resistance will determine the quality of our life.
Learning to make peace with something undesirable, or maybe even pulling a little fun out of something which seems lifeless, is a skill which will serve us well regardless of what we do. The next time we find tedium in our life we should be thankful for the opportunity to condition ourselves to overcome adversity through serenity, wit, and just a little old fashioned fun.
