Do you rail agai t the routine, dull parts of your work? Do you imagine a life in which there are no boring tasks? Well, dream on! There will always be filing. There will always be dust. Like it or not, there is a housekeeping component to any lifestyle or profe ion you can imagine. If you think there is a life style or profe ion that doe 't involve humble, repetitive tasks, you haven't looked closely enough. Ask someone who lives that life. She'll tell you about scheduling the inter , sca ing vast numbers of emails, going to the dump, emptying the dishwasher, compiling the bibliography, and so forth.
The critical i ue, when it comes to mundane maintenance tasks, is to get over your resistance to it. As huma , we only have resistance to things we think we "shouldn't" have to deal with. Have you ever seen anyone have a tantrum about gravity? Of course not. No one in their right mind complai to friends and loved ones about what a burden gravity is for them. About how a oyed they are that when they let go of objects, the objects fall to the ground. How if it weren't for gravity, shoveling ow would be a piece of cake. How much more fun their life would be if they could go up a flight of stairs in a single bound. We don't complain about gravity because we know it to be an immutable fact of life on this planet.
"Filing" is also a non-negotiable fact of life. The creative challenge is to continually get our low-level tasks handled with the least amount of fu and labor. Yes, the papers in your office have a life of their own, and when you go home in the evening, they rearrange themselves into u ightly and disorganized piles. The task at hand is twofold: get over your surprise, dismay, and your wish to have it be otherwise, and just deal with it.
Here are some suggestio to su ort you deal with it:
1. Save your mindle jo for a time of day when you are not at your sharpest. I do my office cleanup, filing, bill-paying, routine phone calls (like making medical or dental a ointments), and so forth at the end of my workday, which is when my mental energy is low. Other people do these jo early in the morning, because it hel them ramp up their energy and focus for the day ahead.
2. Set a ecific time period to work on these job and stick to it. If you set up a 2-hour block, honor it -- start on time and stop after two hours.
3. Multi-task some of the housekeeping jo . While you are on hold for customer service, examine some "probably junk" emails and straighten up your desk. I'm not a great fan of multi-tasking except when it comes to these kinds of tasks.
4. Another way to multi-task is to do these jo while doing something pleasurable or distracting. Play some great music while you do the data entry for your taxes. Watch a video while you stuff envelopes.
5. Buy yourself a headset for your phone. It frees up your hands miraculously. And it saves untold wear and tear on your back, neck and shoulders.
6. Bunch these jo . Carve out blocks of time when that's all you do. You can do an amazing amount of work in concentrated blocks of un-ambiguously committed time. You might even begin to look forward to these blocks of time -- they can be relatively stre -free, and it can be quite a boost to get several of them off your list at once.
7. Delegate the work. Find someone else to do the job for you -- hire, barter, trade, beg, cajole, call in your favors, indenture your pre-teen children. Do not be sto ed by failure of the imagination!
8. "Disguise it." This is a suggestion from an audience member at a talk I gave recently. In particular, the person suggested hosting a task-party -- a social event at which your guests will be doing some work for you, like putting your photos in albums. Meanwhile, there's a lovely social event going on.
9. Ditch it. SOME of the low level jo on your list don't really have to get done. Ever. If you have had some items on your to do list for years -- face it -- it's not going to ha en. You seem to be surviving without it, so get it off your list and get on with your life. For many people, the photos-into-albums job fits into this category. Buy some nice looking storage boxes, put your envelopes of photos into the boxes and be done with it.
10. Share your progre with friends. Celebrate your succe es. It may not be rocket science, but then again, that's what's hard about it!
If you're co idering hiring a coach to help you get some "filing" done, contact me for an initial co ultation at no charge.
COPYRIGHT 2002, Sharon Teitelbaum. All rights reserved. Right to freely duplicate and distribute this newsletter is granted, provided that the newsletter and this paragraph are included in their entirety.
Sharon Teitelbaum, http://www.stcoach.com, a Work-Life and Career Coach, works with high achieving women with young children, people at mid-career, and profe ionals seeking greater career satisfaction and work-life balance. She coaches by phone and in person in Boston. Her newsletter, Strategies For Change, offers practical ti for work-life succe .
Getting U tuck Without Coming Unglued: Restoring Work-Life Balance, Sharon's first book, was published in 2005.
A motivational eaker, Sharon also also delivers keynotes and worksho on work-life i ues. Clients include Childre Ho ital Boston, SunLife Financial, Arnold Worldwide, and many parent and alumni grou . She's been featured in national publicatio including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and Working Mother Magazine.
Married for 30 years, she is the mother of two amazing young women.
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