Make Boring Tasks More Interesting

You tend to start daydreaming spontaneously when you don’t have something harder to do. To make boring tasks more engaging:

1. Up your game. Even a slight increase in standards is often enough to make your focus sharper.
2. Measure your performance, keep track of it as you go and make the stakes higher for whatever you’re doing.
3. Do it differently. If you change up your explicit strategy, removing the ability to do it by rote, you can increase engagement.

Work tasks are rarely chosen by you, so they rarely have optimal difficulty. To make them more likely to produce flow:

1. Slow down on your work and let go of the expectations you have related to your tasks.
2. Complex tasks can seem very overwhelming and frustrating. So...