I like to think that I am very efficient, but have realised that I am mainly efficient when I am passionate about what I am working on. I have problems confronting tasks that are boring, or worse, annoying. They fall to the bottom of my pile until they become urgent, at which time they become less boring. In order to get motivated to do annoying tasks I have to trick myself to think they are fun. For example, when I do anything involving budgets or expenses, my team has a giant calculator we all use for such occasions. A giant calculator makes doing budgeting almost fun. It made doing my taxes a regular riot.
Spreadsheets are another thing that nearly kill me everytime I open one up. In order to do the work I'm asigned that often requires Excel, I simply put everything in cool colour schemes. This makes me get excited to use the spreadsheets, which is good, since I have to use them.
Anyone else have ways you motivate yourself to do boring or annoying tasks?
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3 comments:
you should reward yourself with food when you do something boring...and then when you become overweight you can tell yourself that you have to do push-ups every time you stop doing your boring work...you can keep doing this like a yo-yo for the rest of your life- cool, huh?
actually, I was going to suggest color schemes for the spreadsheets...that was always the fun part for me ;)
I always use a peppy Pandora station to help my boring tasks easier. The Phantom Planet Station is good for housework.
Colour schemes and Pandora are great energisers! Sadly our computer system at work can't cope with Pandora. At the last place I worked the IT team singled out all Pandora users and had a crack down as we were using up too much bandwidth! It was a very difficult time...
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