Get out the stop watch

How to keep things in perspective

Even if you love your job, there are no doubt tasks you don’t like so much. For me it tends to be little administrative tasks like printing signature pages, scanning them, and emailing them back to people. I don’t particularly like uploading sound files to DropBox either.

No doubt you have little tasks that you dislike as well. When there’s something we don’t want to do in life, we can try to ignore it, minimize it, and outsource it. I’m a fan of the third, for sure, but sometimes that isn’t going to work. Fortunately, I do know this: it’s often possible to minimize the time cost of a task by minimizing the mental agony. And that is often about keeping the task in perspective.

For instance, I used to think I spent hours of my life emptying the dishwasher. This task felt very oppressive. I’m spending my life putting dishes away! Then I timed it. It takes me 5 minutes. Now I’m not saying that other people can’t do it, and I’ve worked out a system for that to happen a few times a week too. But five minutes is really not that long. Even if I emptied the dishwasher every day for the rest of my life the time cost wouldn’t be that oppressive. I don’t think it would keep me from doing other things.

We can do the same with little work tasks. Yes, it is annoying to print a form and sign it and scan it on my phone and email it back. But I can do this in less than five minutes too. Usually in less than three since my printer is right by my desk and I use the notes app on the phone to scan and email. By timing myself, I can see that this is a small thing that can fit in the cracks of the day. It is not something that I need to make any bigger than it is.

So, when you are facing an annoying, small task, get out your stop watch. How long does it really take you to send that weekly email? How long does it take you to put that information in a finicky format? How long does it take you to mail that document?

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t look for ways to streamline things. Did I mention DocuSign? There’s also a chance no one is reading that weekly email. Maybe it can go.

But by knowing exactly how long things take, we can stop pretending that having two forms to sign and scan back constitutes an oppressive work load. It does not. It is not an excuse to put off deep work because oh my goodness I have so much other stuff I have to do. Realizing that doesn’t make the tasks less annoying, but when it comes to time in general, this mindset can be liberating.