Willpower is a scarce resource. I can only exert so much willpower in a day¹. Alas, many important tasks require lot of willpower. Examples of such tasks include filing one’s taxes, memorising messy proofs and booking flights. Oftentimes, I’m bottlenecked by willpower rather than time. Rather than increasing willpower - finding Meaning - how about decreasing the amount of willpower required for a given task? This might be an easier problem. Here are my favourite ways of making boring tasks fun.

First, the usual preface to any advice-style post: take care of yourself. Get enough sleep, for example. If you have low baseline energy levels, nothing is fun. Now, on to the interesting parts.

Autonomy #

In my experience, autonomy is the most important factor for making things fun. You need to feel some degree of ownership of the project, or else it just feels like obeying orders. If you’re doing a group project, take responsibility for a subtask. If you’re a student, feel free to skip lectures if they don’t seem valuable. If you’re trying to learn new material, pick your learning resources yourself.

Don’t be afraid to try your own, new learning methods - this can strengthen your sense of autonomy. Additionally, this might lead to the discovery of more efficient learning methods, allowing you to escape local optima.

Teamwork #

I cannot understate the value of teamwork. When starting university, most students are terrible at working in teams. Indeed, there are many common failure modes for efficient teamwork: meeting too irregularly, having different levels of ambition, doing unstructured meetings, to name a few. But you have a lot to gain from teaming up with the right people and getting into a good team workflow.

For example, during exam session, I’d have weekly appointments with friends². For each appointment, we’d have a fixed agenda, like going over a given problem sheet or reproducing proofs from a chapter of the lecture notes. Besides the “obvious” learning benefits (exposing blind spots, easy sanity checking, faster feedback, accountability and so on), the social component made revision much more fun. The study sessions, although goal-oriented, felt much like catching up with a friend. Moreover, whenever I could help others, I also found this quite rewarding.

I find it easier discussing maths with one other person, so I’d have one main study buddy per subject. This also facilitated coordination, making it easier to establish a habit.

Slack #

Don’t underestimate the power of slack. Slack refers to spare capacity, usually in the context of time or money. Eighty-twentying some tasks can be fun too, but you don’t want to eighty-twenty everything. You need at least one project where you let yourself follow your curiosity. Simply put, slack makes everything more fun by improving your baseline mood³. Moreover, if your mind always wanders to that one overdue task, entering a flow state becomes more difficult. For example, dropping one subject this semester gave me more slack, increasing my capacity for enjoyment.

Purpose #

Feeling a sense of purpose is another powerful motivator. But first, an important caveat.

Arbitrary motivational coach: “Focus on the end goal”. For me, reminding myself of the end goal doesn’t make a boring task any less boring. Whenever I’m doing the boring task, I rarely have enough spare cognitive capacity to remind myself of the good cause. For instance, if I’m debugging some code, the idea of producing a report seems far-fetched. And the more near-term goal of making the script work might not be sufficiently motivating.

It’s often easier reframing the task as a personal development project. As I’m debugging, I sometimes think of the software engineering skills I’m building. If pain, maybe gain? To make the task more about my software engineering muscles, I might spend some time looking into better debugging tools. Going down these kinds of rabbit holes can be very productive⁴.

Gamification #

Another classic piece of advice is to gamify the task. Gamification can be done in multiple ways. Try breaking down the project into well-defined subgoals which (i) admit immediate feedback; (ii) are at the right difficulty level in relation to your current skills; (iii) involve some element of novelty or unpredictability; (iv) are time-bound and (v) require your full attention. Additionally, try making progress visceral. These are all common flow triggers. With this much flexibility, the hard part is figuring out how to best gamify a given task.

I’ll give another personal example. As I was revising for exams, I created a huge markdown table with all results I’d have to memorise. In the columns, I filled in the dates I’d reviewed the results and evaluating how it went, using labels like “easy”, “medium” or “hard”⁵. To gamify revision, I set myself the goal to review a given number of results in my first morning working block. Revision, then, involved the game of turning all labels into “easy”.

I’m also considering getting a dedicated Anki notebook. For some of my decks, I need to write out my answers. Doing this in a notebook would help me appreciate my progress.

Conclusion #

There are many more hacks than the ones listed above, and I’ve only tried a fraction of them. However, the hard part is applying these techniques to the task at hand. Here, I don’t see any other way than trial and error. But you should try and err a lot. If you find ways to make boring tasks fun, your willpower reserves will last longer, allowing you to accomplish more later in the day. Then there’s the obvious benefit of having a more fun life. Imagine adult life without chores – that would be something!