About 2 months ago when the exam stress hadn’t started yet, I had a real problem. There were no deadlines in sight! I am the most productive when I’m stressed out. If I know I have to, then I keep going day and night, only have a few breaks for food and I do that until I basically collapse. I’m really not used to not being stressed in one way or another, so having no deadlines really throws me off track. How do you keep going, when there is really no need to do anything and the stuff you’re supposed to be doing doesn’t interest you the least bit?
Well, considering that you really shouldn’t be doing something that doesn’t interest you at all, we all know that every job and every project has its nasty bits. Things need to get organized, background information needs to be filed and if we’re not lucky enough to have an intern or an apprentice who we can torture with this kind of stuff, then we need to be doing this, even though there might be no deadline attached to it at all. It’s the things that just lie there in the “unsorted” pile and one day you will really hate yourself, when you’re looking for this one piece of information that you need really really quickly and you just didn’t file it yet! We know these things: they only take 5 minutes, but we really hate them and therefore they stay on the to-do list for about 3 months or even longer.
Do you sometimes feel as if these items get bigger and bigger and more and more on your to-do list? Well, that’s because you’re not doing them and so they accumulate. One day you will have a random-stuff-I-really-need-to-do-but-really-can’t-be-bothered-list. Right now my random stuff list contains: Paying my rent, paying my hosting bill and paying my deposit for my room in Brighton. For about a week I couldn’t even be bothered to have a proper look at the hosting bill so just now I figured out, that they will just withdraw the money. Imagine what dreadful feeling was already connected to this item after a week of not dealing with it! Now it will just solve itself: if I had known it would’ve been a lot less dreadful to-do-item! I have monsters of to-do items like “Go to dentist” (certainly sits there already a year) or another lovely one is “Call X”, which of course I never do so that in the end those people call me and complain that I never call them.
Approaches that don’t work for me
I tried a few things to get rid of those nasty items and to stop them from accumulating so quickly. There are several approaches that really didn’t work for me at all:
- scheduling the item: It’s already on a list, what would putting it on another list accomplish? It will only make me feel bad for rescheduling again and again! The feeling that it “grows” would be even worse after scheduling and rescheduling it.
- setting a day to do them all: Well, first of all, something else will come up and you’ll do everything to not start working on the list until the day is almost over. Then you’ll fail completing them all. Oh no, now the list seems to be already a meter long.
- ignoring them so that they will do themselves: This sometimes works if it’s only about calling people – they might call you first! If you’re living with other people, they might do the dishes! Your wife might bring out the rubbish! Your daughter might crash your car before you have to do the inspection! This won’t work for things that you actively have to set up though. Paying some bills, calling people you don’t know yet … ticking “first week of term reading” won’t tick itself, sorry to tell you!
These approaches didn’t work for me at all, but this doesn’t mean that they won’t work for you. Try them out and decide whether they are for you!
Approaches that sometimes work
- Telling someone else about it. I usually tell my Mum things I really need to do, because she remembers things and actually asks whether I have done them. To be honest she can be a real pain if you don’t want her to remember things you said
“Did you ask for an appointment then?” – “I didn’t get round to it …” – “You said you would though …” – “Mum!” – “Well, then don’t say you will be doing things, if you don’t do them …!”
- Setting yourself a deadline. For me this only works if the deadline actually has some consequences. For example if I have a coursework that is only due in 3 weeks, but I have to start it early so that I can do other coursework as well, then I usually don’t start it until it’s almost too late to manage to do all of them. Of course I always manage to hand them in, but it really takes me some time to actually start working if there is no real pressure. In this case I sometimes set myself the deadline, that I want to be finished by, say, Friday. On Friday I sometimes go to London for some tango dancing. If I can’t manage to get the coursework done by 6pm on that Friday, I won’t allow myself to go to tango. So, if I make it, I treat myself with tango and if I don’t I punish myself with not allowing myself to go. This gives me enough incentive to start early and get it done in time.
Approaches that always work for me
- Finding something that is worse. The one thing that kept my flat clean during exams was that revision was often worse than cleaning. Cleaning the bathroom is worse than doing laundry and some subjects are worse, i.e. more boring, than others. If you end up not wanting to do something, pick a worse task on your list and magically you’ll prefer doing the original one first. The problem with this is though, that the worst task will remain on the list.
- Try to not do anything for a day. I mean that you’re really not allowed to do anything, but those nasty tasks. No reading, no TV, no movies, no conversations with your family or your flatmates, no MSN, no facebook updating, and no, you’re also not allowed to go for a walk. This of course needs a lot of discipline, because you really have to stick to it then. If I do that I usually get those things done after about 5 minutes, because I just can’t stand doing nothing. I can relax, meaning I can do nothing and just lie in the sun, but if I’m not allowed to “relax”, then I’m pretty screwed!
- One for every work day of the week. If there are lots of those nasty things that I have to do, I do one of them on every work day of the week as the first thing in the morning or first thing after lunch (some people don’t like getting calls at 8 in the morning ). I just write myself a post-it the night before or before I cook my lunch and stick it to my notebook with all my to-dos. In the morning or after lunch I have to get them out of the way, before I’m even allowed to look at my a other to-dos!
Apart from telling people about it or finding something worse, all the other approaches that sometimes or always work for me need discipline. You can’t just expect that these things will get done somehow magically. There is no way around just sitting down and doing this stuff. Remember, you gotta do what you gotta do! Sometimes it’s hard and often I don’t have the discipline to keep the attitude of doing them every day up for long enough. The reason why these nasty little things accumulate is, because they’re nasty and we don’t want to do them! It takes discipline to do the things you hate anyway and I don’t know an awful lot of happy people who can keep up doing things they hate all the time. People who do things they hate without hesitation are usually bitter and unhappy. They think they can’t do anything that is fun for a living anyway and they believe that work has to be dreadful or else it wouldn’t be paid, right? If all of your tasks and your entire work week needs discipline and the worst tasks need even more discipline, you should really reconsider your line of work. If you love your job/work though and there will always be things that you won’t like. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t want to do those ones at all. That’s normal! Just try to not let them get out of hand. If there is an item longer on your to-do list than a week for no other reason than “you can’t be arsed” then something has to be done about it or else you will regret it sooner or later!
Next time you notice one of those to-do-list-lurkers try one of these approaches and see whether they work for you!
