This morning, after I exercised, I found myself frustrated about a recurring task at work that I just don’t like to do. Because I don’t like to do it, I put it off quite often. And then I feel bad about putting it off. And then I feel bad about being a “bad employee” because I put it off. And then I feel resentful that I have to do it at all. And on and on went my wonderfully non-constructive feelings. After going through the whole cycle, I found myself trying to quickly rush through it while backfilling weeks of it.
Clearly not helpful.
Not to mention, I was doing this right after exercise, at 6:30am, before I showered and what I really needed to be doing instead was to get ready and wake the kids up and help them prepare for school. What finally allowed me to walk away was having to say “This is definitely not what I should be doing right now” out loud. I apparently had to hear myself say it. So I finally walked away and went about the business of starting my day. But, of course, this unfinished, way-behind task was still nagging at me.
After the kids were off to school and I’d had time to make some coffee and oatmeal, I decided to take a different point of view. Instead of doing the task resentfully, I decided to have fun with it. While I completed it, I also added humor and used it as an opportunity to connect. I was having enough fun with it that I stopped worrying about it and decided to only catch up on last week and this week and to try to stay on top of it from this moment forward. Making it fun helped me take the pressure off myself and it helped me finish the task without dread and frustration. Since it became my own personal game, I also stopped comparing myself to other colleagues, etc.
All of this made me think about what other areas of my life could use this sort of “lightening up” or at least some major perspective change. When I dread doing things, my normal reaction is to put them off for a while and then power through them once the pressure is high enough. There are times this is productive but most of the time it’s stressful and it’s always unpleasant.
I love the idea of making it fun instead.
We tend to this with kids often. When we give them medicine, we try to make it fun by singing songs or making airplane sounds (at least my parents did.) We either create a distraction or a more enjoyable experience so the task at hand seems less onerous.
Why can’t we do that as adults too?
This is great. I like that you realized you needed the out loud hard stop of redirecting your focus (something kids also need sometimes). I’m going to be thinking about places where I put in lots of negative energy in the form of dread, avoidance, etc, that perhaps could just use a little humor or creativity.