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If you get excited easily about doing lots of interesting things, you probably also experience the side-effect of getting very bored when you’re not able to do what you love. But while you can fill up most of your time with varied and interesting things to do, there will always be some times when you have to complete a task that you just don’t feel like doing.

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 bunch of ideas. Most of them are my coping mechanisms that I have developed over time since I personally tend to react really badly to boredom.

1) Set yourself a specific task to complete with a reward at the end. Once you are clear about what the task entails, put all your energy into the boring task immediately and do not stop until the task is finished. As soon as you are finished enjoy your reward without any guilt or distraction.

2) Reduce the number of boring tasks you have to do in the first place by delegating them to someone else. You might not be able to get rid of everything that is boring, but if you give delegating a go you might be surprised at what you can let go. When it comes to personal tasks like ironing and cleaning you will need to pay someone, but at work you might even find some willing takers, and your good delegation skills could end up getting you a promotion!

3) Ask a friend to help or just to keep you company. Recently I was moving house and I found packing to be a really boring task. A friend offered to come visit a couple of times while I was packing. It was great! I think I packed more things during the time she was visiting than I did on my own for the whole rest of the week.

4) Split your task up into milestones so that you can tick off your percentage complete. If you know that you have to make twenty sales calls and you don’t feel like it, then you can feel good about your task being already 20% complete after the first four.

5) Weave a fanciful and amusing storyline around your current task and pretend you are about to embark on an exciting adventure! I’ve never done this to help with boring tasks personally, but it is suggested by Barbara Sher in her book Refuse to Choose.

6) Sing or listen to music. While I can’t stand to listen to music while I’m in the flow of a task I really love (because my favourite tasks usually involve focused thinking), it can be a relief when doing something that’s a drag. Singing is even better, but listening with discrete earphones is more appropriate at work

7) If you have two boring tasks to do one after the other, why not try doing the both at the same time? The switching between the two boring tasks might add enough variety to make the combination interesting.
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) Athletes use interval training to do short bursts of high energy activity. You can use it to do short bursts of getting boring things done! Just setup a timer for 5, 10 or 15 minutes and work as fast as you can during that time. Work out how long the total task will take you and slot the sprints in around your other activities. I use to do that when I worked from home as a telephone researcher when I was at uni. I would do six sprints a day of 20 minutes each whenever it was most convenient for me. I never had to put up with two-hour blocks of tedious phone calling, but still got the work done.

11) Instead of wasting your time doing the same task repeatedly, see if you can find a way to set up an automated system for getting the task done. This is particularly the case with anything done on the computer. For example, when I started my career in IT I took a job as a software tester, but then I realised that I hated testing because I found the step-by-step regression tests to be particularly tedious. To make the task better, I learned how to use an automated testing software package and wrote some scripts that would do the specific mouse clicks for me. I topped it off by writing an instruction manual to teach the other members on my team how to do it too.

At Petra Smirnoff .com I have more information about living with Scanner/ Renaissance Soul Personality (multiple interests). I also share tips about Career development.