Make a list of annoying tasks

When you see all your unpleasant tasks in one place, you can tackle them, and keep them in perspective

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to make a list of annoying tasks. By
keeping track of all the things that you need to

(00:24):
do but don't particularly want to do, you can motivate
yourself to make progress, keep these tasks in perspective, and
hopefully won't miss any deadlines along the way. So I
was recently feeling a bit weighed down by the volume
of tasks I knew I needed to tackle at some point.
Many of these were annoying and multipart. For instance, I

(00:47):
needed to sign some financial paperwork, which I thought would
be straightforward, but then I had trouble logging in. I
had to submit other forms before I could sign things, etc.
To file a tax report about my retirement account and
another one about an LLC. I need to update my
clearances to volunteer at my kids' schools, and so on.

(01:11):
In many cases, I feel like these systems are needlessly complex.
They take time that they don't need to. This is
time that I am not writing, or playing with my kids,
or doing something fun for me. So all in all,
things that I find annoying. But in life, it's important
to recognize when we can change things, because then we

(01:33):
should try to change things. And when certain things are
fairly outside our control, I am unlikely to get to
change the setup that the school system has put in
place to process volunteer clearances or any of these other things.
They must simply be dealt with. So to make this
all feel less onerous, I made a list of all

(01:54):
the annoying tasks that I know I will need to
deal with at some point in the near future. My
first takeaway is that the list wasn't infinite. Now, don't
get me wrong, it was long, but it wasn't infinite,
so that was helpful to see. Then I could see
what had to be done immediately and what didn't. The

(02:16):
financial paperwork needed to get turned around, but we're out
of school now and will be for a while, so
the clearances could be shoved forward. As part of this,
I could also pace myself by my signing myself one
annoying task per week. I could muster all of my
excess energy to deal with that one task. I wasn't

(02:38):
feeling bad that I didn't file the LLC paperwork one
week because that was the week I was dealing with
the retirement account forms. The LLC stuff could happen the
next week. When you assign yourself only one task per week,
it has a much higher chance of getting done, or
at least that's what I have found is true for me.

(03:00):
I try not to put things on my to do
list that I don't actually intend to do. So once
an annoying task was on the list for the week,
I generally do it because again, it's only one thing.
And now I have been the happy beneficiary of the
truth that if you keep making small progress, the list

(03:21):
does eventually go down. I have done several of the
annoying tasks, and while more do come up alas the
pace has been such that the list is getting smaller,
I have been crossing things off at a steady clip.
Perhaps you will find the same thing. So if you

(03:41):
two are feeling weighed down by the list of nagging,
complicated and unpleasant tasks you need to do, try listing
them all so you have a sense of them. You
want to make sure you are not forgetting stuff. This
will also allow you to make sure that you don't
miss deadlines, because you can triage to do the immediate

(04:04):
annoying tasks before the ones with a farther off deadline,
and then you can assign yourself the tasks at a
steady pace so you get through them. You can take
comfort from the fact that the list is probably not infinite.
It may be long, but it won't be infinite. Am
I still annoyed that one camp won't accept our electronically

(04:26):
signed health form from our pediatrician, so someone has to
bring the camp's particular forum to the office and get
it signed. Yes, yes, I am annoyed. But if that
is the only annoying task I have to deal with
in a week, well maybe I can just drop it
on the way somewhere and send someone else to pick
it up and it won't be so bad in the
grand scheme of things. In the meantime, this is Laura.

(04:51):
Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of
our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've
got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at
Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a

(05:18):
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