I have joined a 30-day Productivity Challenge and wanted to share my journey with you and invite you to join me. Click here – https://30dayproductivity.com – if you want to join me. I think that this could be a lot of fun, especially completing it as a community.

Today’s productivity challenge is to make tasks fun. This is actually challenging for me because, I, well, do not really know how to “play.” It is something that I have been working on learning to do, which I know sounds really odd. My life has not been easy, and I don’t want to go into that here, but “playing” was not really a part of it. So, I learned to find enjoyment in doing mundane tasks by doing one or a combination of the following:

(1) Listen to something, either a podcast, an audiobook, or even music. Getting engrossed in something in the background can make that mundane task better – assuming that it is a task that does not require deep focus or attention. This is great when doing home maintenance tasks; the ones that you could probably do with your eyes closed because you have done them so often!

(2) Set a timer for Pomodoro time periods. Focus on the mundane task for 25 minutes and stop when the timer goes off. Take a short, 5-minute break, reset the timer, and focus on the mundane task again. Basically, you are going to brute force your way through the work, but in short sessions.

Alternatively, you can also race the timer and see how much of the task that you can get done before the timer goes off. This is great when working with children and does make it a bit of a game for them. The work itself still might not be fun, but having a race is.

(3) Meditate or think about other things, also known as daydreaming. This is how I survived hours of boring tasks growing up when I did not have access to something to listen to. Today, the adult version would be visualizing opposed to daydreaming. I have always been able to have at least two trains running around the mental track of my mind – one to focus on what I am doing, i.e. the mundane task, and the other to visualize various scenarios. Even now, while reading a book or listening to a podcast, I am fully engaged, thinking only one train is running, but then I will have a burst of inspiration about something else because that second train is also running, just more off in the distance.

(4) Find your zone or flow to get into the groove. This can happen by just starting the task or project and just flow with it. This is predominantly how I work for personal projects, coursework for school, and projects for work. I will get into such a state of flow that I lose track of everything else going on around me: noise, time, even food or someone saying my name. I do stop when the phone rings, so my husband makes a point to call me at some point in the afternoon to remind me to eat lunch!

I realize that none of these really make doing tasks “fun” but they are the skills that I have developed over the years to get things done in a way that I find to be enjoyable. Assuming that you know how to “play” what would you do to make mundane tasks “fun”? I would really love to know!