Tackling Tasks You Dread Doing

We all have a task we really don’t enjoy doing. It’s a task that fills us with a wide range of not-so-fuzzy feelings: dread, annoyance, anxiousness, boredom, frustration and so on. Sometimes it’s very difficult to feel any kind of motivation to tackle these jobs on our to-do lists. Everyone has that I-really-wish-I-was-doing-something-else chore, and it varies from person to person. What I hate doing, you might actually enjoy doing and vise versa.

Maybe it’s not so much a chore as it is a project. You know you need to work on it but can’t quite bring yourself to set aside the time. My mother-in-law asked me to knit a scarf made from her kids’ t-shirts. Since undertaking the project I have somehow managed to get all of the yarn tangled twice. If you’ve ever had to untangle a mass of anything, you know how frustrating and tedious this is! That project has sat on the table for months because every time I think of it, I feel the frustration and dread of untangling all of that yarn.

So how can we overcome feelings like this and get the job done? Here are some ways that have helped me:

The 10-Minute Rule

Make an agreement with yourself to spend at least 10 minutes working on a chore/project. You could even drop it down to 5 minutes if it’s something you really, really don’t want to do. Or, if you feel like you want to, give it 20 minutes. However many minutes it is, make a pact with yourself to work all the way through that time. It gets you actually working on the task, and you don’t feel like it’s a huge commitment. When I use this rule I find myself thinking “Well, this isn’t so bad.” I actually end up working on the project for more than 10 minutes. I did this with the mass of tangled yarn. I ended up working on it for a half an hour and challenged myself to get at least one color untangled and wrapped into a ball. If you get to the end of the 10 minutes, and you think you could spend a little more time working, do it! If you’re ready to be done after the time is up, that’s o.k. too. At least you sat down and spent some time working on it instead of completely ignoring it.

Alternate Enjoyable Tasks With Less Enjoyable Ones

Look at your to-do list. Which tasks do you enjoy or tolerate more? Try fitting these in between the less enjoyable chores. If you despise cleaning but like to exercise, schedule an exercise session after a cleaning session. You’ll feel motivated to finish cleaning so you can move onto the more enjoyable activity of exercising. You could also schedule all of the less fun activities in the morning, so they’re done and out of the way. Now you have the rest of the day to work on your favorite things!

Break It Up

This kind of ties into the 10-Minute Rule. At one point, our apartment was horribly cluttered. You couldn’t walk anywhere without tripping on something. You couldn’t use counter space without having to push a mountain of stuff aside. It was maddening! I wanted to de-clutter our space right now, but the thought of doing it was incredibly overwhelming. I was imagining a whole day devoted to cleaning. Finally, I realized I was never going to get anything done if I continued to focus on cleaning the whole apartment in a day (or even a few days). The idea of it was so overwhelming that I was too anxious to even try it. It’s a small apartment, but trust me, there’s a lot of stuff in here. I decided to break up the workload, and it has definitely paid off. I focused on the areas that were driving me crazy the most. These were “high-traffic” areas that we needed to use every day. I would clean one surface a day. One day it was the counter, the next day it was the living room table, and so on. Slowly (but surely!) the apartment started to look a lot nicer. If you are overwhelmed by a job, try breaking it up into smaller, workable, pieces. Who says you need to get it all done in one go? You may be surprised at how much you accomplish when you take the pressure off of yourself.

Whistle While You Work

Make certain jobs more fun! Listen to some music, an audio book, or your favorite t.v. show (unless you’re too distracted by watching, of course!). Find a podcast or radio show about a subject you enjoy and listen to that. When I do this, it really helps to lighten that mental burden of “Oh, I have to do this again.” When you have something you enjoy listening to in the background, it turns into “I get to do this again!” It’s like a mental “Me-time.”

These are just a few ideas that have helped me to get over the mental and emotional obstacles of certain tasks. Try them out and let me know what you think! Have any ideas you can add to this list? Let me know in the comments!