What Do You Do About Boredom?
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Being excited by many different things has a corollary effect of experiencing insane boredom when you’re not doing the things you feel passionate about. But while you can fill up your time with varied and interesting projects, there will always be times when you are 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 what do you do when you absolutely have to knuckle down because your boss, your coworkers, your family, your friends, your lecturers or a committee you volunteered to help are relying on you and you’re about to miss the deadline if you leave it any longer. Its not worth being a rebel, you’ve just got to get it done.
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) Rather than setting a time-based goal, set a task based goal and use a personal project as the reward. Put all your energy into your boring task and do not stop until the task is finished. If you can get into ‘the zone’ you might even enjoy it!
2) Set yourself up to have fewer boring tasks to do in the first place by delegating the things you have to do that you find uninteresting. You might not be able to delegate away all of your boring tasks, but you can certainly make a good dent on them. For example, if you are really itching to work on some creative projects you could delegate your bookkeeping. If you want to spend your home time tracing your genealogy, hire someone else to clean the house.
3) Ask a friend for help or just to keep you company. Recently I was moving house and a friend offered to come by and visit while I packed. It was a great idea! Having someone to talk to while I packed made the time go so much faster and kept me busy working, far more than if I was alone.
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) Turn the task into part of an imaginative drama or storyline so that you can amuse yourself silly. Pretend your task is part of a lead-up to an exciting adventure! (This idea is from Barbara Sher in Refuse to Choose).
6) Crank up the music. When you’re doing something boring music can turn it from being a drag to being a disco! Experiment with different styles of music to see what works best in your circumstances. If you need to write, best to keep to non-vocal music.
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. As a kid, this was the only way I could get myself to clean my bedroom. I made a pact with myself that if I picked up and put away 10 items I would allow myself to read one page of my book. Then once I had read one page I would have to go and pick up another 10 items before getting to read the next page. It worked! I still do this today when it comes to tidying the house.
9) Get a stopwatch and make it a challenge for yourself. How quickly can you write that 2000 word essay? Turn on the stopwatch and find out! Then next time see if you can beat your own personal record 
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 spending all your time doing a boring task, see if you can find a way to set up an automated system for getting the task done. If you succeed it will pay off both now and in the future. For example, I once took a job as a software tester and I hated to do the step-by-step regression tests because I found them to be incredibly boring. Instead, I added value to my workplace by learning how to use an automated testing software package, writing some scripts that would do the specific mouse clicks for me, and then wrote an instruction manual for the rest of the team, teaching them how to write their own automated test code in VBScript!
At Petra Smirnoff .com I have more information about living with Scanner/ Renaissance Soul Personality (multiple interests). I also share tips about Getting things done.
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