Ninety minutes of misery
They have to be carefully laid out, and then they need to just sit there in the sun and dry out. (Image by manseok Kim)
Nebulous tasks are always the easiest ones to put off.
Even if you have clearly defined what you are going to do (“Write first draft” or “Fill out recommendation form”), there is an ugly amorphousness to certain things on our to-do list. We just don’t know how long they are going to take, and we suspect that it isn’t going to be a fun experience to do them. This one is going to require an uncertain amount of effort, attention, and focus; that one requires us to pull something out of ourselves that we aren’t sure we have. It makes perfect sense to choose something smaller, better defined, or practiced.
Unfortunately, we cannot (or at least, should not) avoid unpleasant tasks forever. Eventually, the time will come when we have got to just do the thing. I have a few different ways of handling this; here, I’ll talk about one. I call it Scheduled Misery. It goes like this:
I estimate the time required to do the task;
I pad my estimate significantly;
I set a timer, including the extra time;
I start doing the work.
This doesn’t mean I’m some fabulously disciplined person. No! I’ve simply built in time for the staring off into space, getting distracted, getting frustrated, not being able to think of an idea, feeling jealous of pets because they don’t have to do work, and so on. The temper tantrums are on the clock.
There’s something strangely comforting about knowing that I can spend ten minutes feeling resentful about having to do this thing and another ten minutes whining about how hard it is and still get it done. By the time the timer goes off, the misery will be over.
Sometimes, I’m even able to skip the whining and the not being able to think of an idea. I simply get down to work, knowing that the extra time left on the clock can be spent on something fun once I finish this terrible task.
No matter how much control you have over your time, there will always be things you don’t want to do. At the very least, you’ll have to hire the guy who will be in charge of all of your other servants, right? Scheduled Misery can help you to keep a sense of perspective about how much discomfort these unwanted tasks take up your life. You can even compartmentalize your worry about them.
Teaching middle school has shown me that a single homework assignment has the power to ruin an entire evening for an entire family. Two hours of angsty procrastination are followed by a half hour of arguing and a twenty-minute, full-on tantrum. When the tear-stained worksheet is finally completed, the time spent completing the actual assignment turns out to be only three minutes.
Adults are no different. Our assignments aren’t always that much longer, even. We just make the stakes higher and potentially ruin an entire week or more in our worry and guilt and other unhelpful feelings.
We can make a game out of this. It’s not a fun game, but it’s better than the one we’ve been playing. Can the middle schooler complete the assignment within three hours, including all of the drama? Can I send a routine email, one that I am irrationally dreading, within ninety minutes? The clock starts now.
What will you do? And how long will it take? Can you do it today? Let us know in the comments!
