Ask HN: How do you force yourself in doing something you don't like?

2 pointsSpaceInvader2 comments

My whole professional career I struggled with certain tasks - mostly paperwork related, I try to avoid them as much as I can. While I love technical job and hands on I can't force myself to do necessary paperwork and this does have an impact on how I'm being seen by my boss.

How do you deal with such things? My goal is to push mentally these tasks into "it's not that bad to do".

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I do that by breaking the boring task into chunks of size one - one page, one text file, one paragraph - and doing that one chunk in between tasks I enjoy. Enjoyable task for half hour, 5 minutes on next chunk, enjoyable task for half hour, 5 minutes on next chunk...

"One" is the magic number for me, make it anything greater and my brain seems incapable of understanding 2/3/4 != infinity, collapsing itself into the procrastination pit.

I'm trying to do similar thing - but I rather group boring stuff and do it in between, but that doesn't seem to be working very well for me. Maybe I should do it in similar fashion to what you do, will check that :D

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