How to Enjoy Boring Tasks
How do you learn to enjoy boring tasks?
Life is full of boredom and routine. Many times, these actions are meaningless or useless. Learning to enjoy them helps us avoid the game of waiting -- waiting for the next event to gives us excitement, for the next person to make us feel something, for the next task to make us happy.
This waiting game results in a life that Ralph Waldo Emerson describes as, "getting to live but never living."
One of the simplest, but most important lessons, I picked up as I read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow is counterintuitive: the secret to making boring activities enjoyable is to invest attention in it.
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Attention is the difference between boredom, pleasure, & enjoyment
Any activity can become an engrossing, high quality leisure activity when given sufficient attention.
For example, most of my friends find pleasure in listening to music. They love how "catchy" it is. They look forward to "the drop." But I take my interest in pop music one step further.
I took an "Introduction to Pop Music" course in university that gave me an appreciation for how pop music has developed from its African-American roots. I dig into the meaning of lyrics via Genius.com. I read books about how pop music gets made like Derek Thompson's Hitmakers. I like Kanye's "Monster", for example, not just because it's catchy, but because I know it's historical significance as the track that put Nicki Minaj on the rap map.
I learned to enjoy music not only because it expresses emotions that I have bottled up inside, but also because I pay attention when I listen. As Csikszentmihalyi puts it in the book, "It is not the hearing that improves life, it is the listening."
Enjoyment isn't about what you do, but how you do it
On paper, listening to music is unproductive and useless because it doesn't have any tangible output. But with practice and intentionality, even "useless" activities can become enjoyable.
I feel different after a listening session when I'm just waiting for the beat to drop, versus when I'm focused and trying to understand the lyrics. I find pleasure in the former, but really enjoy the latter.
Csikszentmihalyi identifies the following requirements in order to induce a similar form of enjoyment in any other task:
Set an overall goal, problem, or question you want to answer
Find ways of measuring progress
Concentrate on what I'm doing
Make finer distinctions in the challenges
Develop skills necessary to interact with the opportunities available
Raise the stakes if things become boring
Listening to podcasts like Dissect, have heightened my awareness for the subtleties in hip hop and the genius of the artists who make it, hidden beyond its explicit content. Now, I listen to a Kanye West or Taylor Swift album and challenge myself to identify the musical handoffs, word play, and easter eggs within each song.
Enjoyment is about ordering your attention
"We can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention."
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow
Ultimately, learning to enjoy innane tasks like taking dishes out of the dishwasher are all about ordering our attention and intentionally using them to control the chaos within each of our own minds.
Even if it's just paying attention to what makes music pop.
Not every task has a cosmic purpose. But every task always has a goal it wants to achieve, a problem it wants to solve, or a question it's trying to answer.
How much enjoyment you get out of a task isn't based on what or why you do it, but about the approach of doing it, the how. And unlike, the why or the what, the how is entirely under your control.