How to do unpleasant tasks well

Each of us must do things we don’t like in our jobs. Effectively doing things that you like is pretty easy. But if you’re going to be successful, you’ll need to do unpleasant things well, too. So: here are some thoughts on doing unpleasant things well, from a person who had done thousands of unpleasant things well over the decades.

If everything is unpleasant, you’re in the wrong job (or have the wrong attitude)

I’m going to start with the assumption that your day is not filled with unpleasantness from start to finish. If that’s your job, start looking for a new job right now. You are not going to be able to get motivated if unpleasantness surrounds every task.

If every job you can think of is nothing but unpleasant tasks, the problem isn’t the work, it’s you. You need to find the joy in at least some of your work. Just because it’s work doesn’t mean it has to be drudgery.

Doing unpleasant tasks well

Unpleasant tasks fall into three categories.

The first category are scheduled things that you dread. For example: firing an employee who consistently lags expectations, or conducting a parent-teacher conference with a particularly challenging set of parents.

To make those tasks better, prepare. Role-play what you’re going to do, write down a sequence of steps you will follow, and prepare a set of responses for unpleasant things that may happen in the meeting. This allows you to assert some control over the unpleasantness, which will make it less unpleasant.

The second category are unpleasant things that you can’t plan for. For example, the power goes out in your house and you need to save the food in the refrigerator. Or, your biggest customer has a technical problem and you need to solve it.

It is easy to freak out at moment like these. But as I learned early in my career, after panicking, you must eventually evaluate the situation and figure out the best way to deal with it. You may as well skip the panicking and go directly to the problem-solving. This will never be fun, but once again, making a bad situation less bad at least feels productive. And if others see you as a good problem-solver in a crisis, you will get a reputation as a leader.

The third category of unpleasant tasks are the most common. These are the tasks you know you have to do, but dread. Often, people put off doing these tasks because they loom large and awful in the imagination. After doing such tasks, you also often hear people say, “Wow, that was a lot easier than I thought it would be.” As it turns out, the dread magnifies the unpleasantness way out of proportion.

Here’s how I deal with unpleasant tasks for which I control the schedule:

1. I don’t do them first thing in the day. Motivational gurus will tell you to do your most dreaded task first. Nobody wants to do that. I like to get myself going by doing tasks that are enjoyable, so I feel productive and competent. So I say “Hey, let’s do that unpleasant task at 10:00 or 11:00 or right after lunch, rather than first thing in the morning.
2. I plan the unpleasant task. All tasks have steps. You’ll feel better if you know what those steps are. Then you will be able to break the unpleasant task down into pieces. And, unsurprisingly, lots of those pieces will be less unpleasant than what you were dreading.
3. I do a half-assed job. Yes, you read that right. If you have to write a 20-page report, write it with lots of parts missing and other parts not even in complete sentences. In essence, create a rough, rough draft of your task. That will go much faster than doing the whole task well, because you can just skate through the difficult parts.
4. Then I redo the task well. It is far easier to go from a crappy first draft to a great one, than to go from nothing at all to greatness. No matter what the task is, if you’ve sort of done a “dress rehearsal,” it will then become a lot easier to do the tasks.

Take note of one thing: this only works if you allow enough time to plan, draft, and revise. If you’re right up against the deadline, you won’t have time to follow these steps. And you’ll be stuck with powering through the unpleasant task from start to end, on a deadline — which is the worst. (That’s what creates drinking problems.)

Anyway, that’s my strategy for unpleasant tasks. What’s yours?