[2021-11-12] Making essential activities enjoyable
I recently began listening to Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most by Greg McKeown. I probably should have started with McKeown's first book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, but I didn't, and that's OK. Effortless is so full of anecdotes and answers to life's challenges that it's easy to pick up the book, read or listen to one small section, and immediately take something away that can be applied.
One of the first things that caught my attention was McKeown's discussion of enjoyable versus essential activities. He writes:
We all have things we do consistently not because they’re important but because we actively look forward to doing them. Maybe it’s listening to a particular podcast, watching a favourite TV show, singing karaoke, dancing to our favourite tunes or playing games with friends.
At the same time, we all have important activities we don't do consistently because we actively dread doing them. Maybe it's exercising, doing our finances, washing the dishes after dinner, returning emails or voicemails, attending meetings or waking up our teenagers for school.
But McKeown points out that this distinction between enjoyable and essential activities is a false dichotomy—we assume that activities are either enjoyable or essential, but can't be both. McKeown says that this works against us in two ways.
Believing essential activities are almost by definition tedious, we are more likely to put them off or avoid them completely. At the same time, our nagging guilt about all the essential work we could be doing instead sucks all the joy out of otherwise enjoyable experiences.
This artificial separation makes life harder than it needs to be, insists McKeown. He acknowledges that not every essential activity is inherently enjoyable, but suggests that we can make necessary tasks pleasurable.
Essential work can be enjoyable once we put aside the Puritan notion that anything worth doing must entail back-breaking effort. Why would we simply endure essential activities when we can enjoy them instead? By pairing essential activities with enjoyable ones, we can make tackling even the most tedious and overwhelming tasks more effortless.
For example, McKeown found that when he and his family paired doing the dishes (an essential activity) with listening to Disney songs (a fun activity), the chore went from something to be endured to something to be enjoyed. Similarly, when he paired returning voicemails (an essential activity he hated) with sitting in his hot tub (an optional activity he loved), he ceased to dread the task of calling people back.
McKeown also shares the story of a father who loathed the annual process of producing a pine-wood derby car. The father didn't possess the necessary skill—craftsmanship—and the resulting car that he and his son built finished dead last. The next year wasn't much better: they finished second to last. But by the third year, the father and son took a different approach. They decided to focus on style rather than speed; their goal was to win the design award instead of the speed award. The joy of the experience was the reward.
Pairing essential activities with enjoyable ones may seem obvious, but not if we see the former as something we need to simply power our way through and the latter as the reward for doing so. Perhaps the key to avoiding the false dichotomy is to start with an enjoyable activity and then to pair it with an essential one. McKeown provides just such an example. One leader he worked with saw running on a treadmill as an essential habit, but he was incapable of doing it consistently. That was until he paired it with an enjoyable practice he never missed, namely, listening to his favourite podcast. Now, the leader listens to his daily podcast only when he is walking or running on the treadmill. Rather than reward himself after he finishes his workout, the leader rewards himself during the essential activity.
I have fallen for the false dichotomy McKeown describes. I remember having to review about 20 applications from individuals vying for the position of chief of informatics. Most applicants provided tediously long CVs filled with technical jargon, which I—as the hiring manager—had to pore over to ensure that an answer to one of the screening criteria wasn't buried on page nine of the CV. It was a slog. The only way I got through it was by rewarding myself with an online game of Boggle after I completed my review of each application.
I still tend to think like a Puritan: work hard then play hard. Once I finish writing, designing, publishing and sharing my daily blog post, I often reward myself with a game or two (or 10!) of an online puzzle. I'll often delay sleep to play my game.
But tonight I did something a little different. Because of an early evening commitment, I was late in starting my post. By the time I got home, I was already tired. My daughter and I powered through the remaining dishes, and then I sat down at 8:00 PM to start the process of coming up with tonight's blog post. But instead of writing my post at the dining room table, I slipped upstairs to my bed. I love being in my bed, especially in colder months. That made the hard work of conceiving and writing a post more enjoyable.
I think it will take me much more practice to naturally add fun during challenging undertakings, but I'll give it a shot.
