When we mentally go
through our “to-do” lists at the start of every day, there are certain tasks
that create an excited shiver of anticipation, but there are equally others
that will send us to sleep.
The boring stuff often
gets relegated to the bottom of the list, but the realists among us know that
it is exactly this that should be tackled first. We all have an aspect of
boring routine about our jobs, but if this is ignored for too long, it often turns
into an issue for us and, more importantly, for others.
I won’t go into the
details of the mundane drudgery that I have to handle as the owner of a
business, and it is far from possible to delegate everything. You simply have
to turn up in the morning with a goal to be the best that you possibly can that
day, and in order to do the exciting stuff you have to wade through the swamp
of admin, emails, etc, first.
Looking at things from
another perspective (something that is always worth doing), what may seem
boring and routine for you may have any number of flip sides.
Approving invoices is
a simple example. A certain piece of work has been done for LMA and my
signature is required to release the funds. Rather than blindly approving, I
like to pause for a moment and consider how each investment has taken my
business forward. Every invoice means valuable money for our suppliers, food on
their tables and hope for the future. While it may be slightly painful to spend
our hard-earned money, they have delivered on what they promised, and there is
another layer in vital relationships. Like it or not, money makes the world go
around, and contemplating the return on what we spend (nearly always) gives me
a warm feeling inside. Approving invoices might be a mechanical task, but if
you look behind the action, it is what helps my business to grow. If we didn’t
pay our suppliers on time, relationships would become shaky and future
collaborations would suffer.
If the unspectacular
work is not done in the right way, there is no foundation for the spectacular
to come to pass.
The movement towards
gamification in the workplace adds another aspect to this discussion. This
artificial competition creates an extra dimension to cold calling, email
correspondence or admin tasks. It ensures that they get done to the best if our
ability and the extra incentives on offer often show that we can achieve much
more than we previously thought possible. If you clear your inbox in 20 minutes
in the “game”, why can’t you do it every day?
However, no matter how
much motivation you can find to get all the boring stuff done, the natural
preference for the exciting stuff will remain. The point comes when you simply
have to put up and shut up.
“Aspects of my job are
dull as ditch water, and I’m okay with that.”