If you think this is boring, it's only going to get worse
Why the last part of a mundane task is painful, and how to trick yourself into hating it less.
Pick one of these three scenarios:
A long commute
A mundane work task
A tedious house chore
Think about how you feel at the start of the experience, when you’re just getting going. Then think about how you feel when you’re further along, maybe more than halfway through it but still not done.
If you’re like me, the beginning part is oddly easier. Not enjoyable, and there are other things I’d rather be doing, but my mood is neutral. But that final stretch of a mundane task (e.g., expense reports) is a total slog. It can feel worse. But shouldn’t it feel better? Shouldn’t you feel happier when you’re almost done with a dull experience? Isn’t a sense of completion satisfying?
Not when it’s something you don’t want to be doing.
The more we complete something boring, the worse we feel.
A paper published last April in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explained the reason behind this counterintuitive feeling, and it has changed how I think about those excruciatingly boring experiences.
Researchers ran experiments that examined subway commutes, mandatory quarantines, meetings, and other boring situations.
Here’s what they concluded: As we make our way through a boring task, our attitude toward it changes depending on the amount of the task that we’ve completed. When we’ve completed a low proportion (let’s say 20 minutes into an hour-long meeting), we’re less bothered because we’ve had to tolerate a smaller share of the overall dull experience.
But when the proportion is higher (45 minutes into the hour-long meeting), we feel worse. Why? Because we’ve had to endure a bigger segment of the monotonous chore.
Researchers referred to this as relative task completion. What matters is the ratio of the boring task completed to what remains. The more of it you complete, the worse you feel.
What’s brain breaking about this whole thing is that this isn’t about time. It’s about proportion. In other words, you might feel more restless 20 minutes into a 30-minute meeting (66 percent of the boring experience) than you would if you were 20 minutes into an hour-long meeting (only 33 percent of the boring experience).
When I first read this it sounded backwards. But then I started to think about tedious assignments and chores and I realized that my mood does indeed deteriorate as the percentage of the experience increases.
Are you bored right now? This might help.
If reading this newsletter is boring, then I apologize because you’re getting to the end of it—which means you may feel even worse.
Here’s the good news: Researchers examined strategies for making the last leg of a mundane experience less painful.
Tip 1: Break a long boring task into separate parts. Again, this seems counterintuitive because you’re giving yourself more unenjoyable “to-do” items instead of packing it all into one unit of work.
But researchers confirmed this approach in an experiment. They had two groups of students who were given 10 assignments to complete:
Those in the low completion condition were presented with two sets of tasks—six “reflection reports” and four “response notes.”
Those in the high completion condition were simply given one large assignment—10 “reflection reports.”
Sure enough, when each group got to the seventh assignment, moods differed. The low completion condition rated the seventh assignment as less negative compared with the high completion condition. Why? Because that seventh assignment was actually the first in a new task, so the task completion was lower.
Tip 2: Think about a boring task as just one part of the entire day. When we’re working on something boring, we tend to immerse ourselves in the task, thinking about it as a journey from start to finish.
But what if instead we thought of the one boring task as a single leg of a longer journey? The researchers ran an experiment that tested this idea (emphasis mine):
…participants were asked to indicate how many hours were left before they would go to bed that day (i.e., end of day). This reminder should expand the completion benchmark (distribution information) from the end of the focal task (i.e., this online study) to the end of the day, thereby reducing perceived relative completion and improving their mundane experience (inferring “I have only endured a little compared with what I have to do today, so I am not tired yet”).
Weirdly, by thinking about the number of hours left in the rest of the day, participants were able to shift how they felt about the boring task they were working on. The relative task completion ratio was altered, making them believe that the experience was a smaller proportion of something bigger (the rest of the day).
Tip 3: Frame a boring task as a benchmark.
When we’re working on a single mundane chore, researchers found that we’re going to feel worse in the home stretch. Tip 2 reframed this mindset by thinking about the remaining hours in the day.
Another approach is to frame the task within the context of your larger workload. Think of it not as a single project but as a benchmark.
If you have 10 items on your to-do list, then the one boring task is actually only 10 percent of the task completion. As researchers described in the paper, “busyness attenuates the effect of relative task completion on mundane experience.”
Here’s another way they explained it (emphasis mine):
For example, consider two people finishing a day of work and on a crowded subway home. One of them is busier and has a few virtual business meetings at night. In this situation, the busier one will feel less tired standing in the crowded subway because the distribution information that they use to evaluate their commuting experience includes the evening meetings, making the commute seem like a smaller portion of their total workday. However, the less busy one will feel more tired on the subway because the subway commute is the last task for the day.
This doesn’t mean we should make ourselves busier than we need to be. But when you do have lots going on, remind yourself that the boring assignment is part of a larger set of work that needs to be completed. Use that long to-do list to make those mundane experiences a little more bearable.
Thanks for reading.
Eric
