Ask Yourself, “What Would This Assignment Look Like If It Were Fun?”
If you follow productivity guru Tim Ferriss, you may be familiar with his mind-changing question, “What would it look like if it were easy?”
As he explains in his book The Mentor Tribe :
How would it look if it was easy? such a beautiful and deceptively crafted question. It’s easy to convince yourself that things have to be difficult, that if you don’t redline you’re not trying hard enough. This forces us to look for ways of greatest resistance, creating unnecessary difficulties in the process.
But what happens if we look at things in terms of elegance rather than tension? Sometimes we find incredible results with ease, not stress. Sometimes we “solve” a problem by completely rethinking it.
On Money.com, Nina Semchuk explains how she incorporated this question into her workflow and added a second question of her own: “What would it look like if it was fun?”
Here’s how Semchuk turned oil change and tire rotation into something she really wanted to do:
To make the task of servicing the car easier, I chose the most open day, although I usually try not to schedule routine things for it: Saturday.
Then, to make the assignment “fun,” I thought about how I like to spend my time. My ideal weekend starts early and outdoors. How can I add this to the mandatory chores? Solution: I found a nearby town with a Mavis service station located next to one of my favorite bike paths. Then I called a friend I hadn’t seen in almost a year to make a bike date. Now the tedious business had an incentive: I could see an old friend and at the same time revisit my favorite railroad track.
Many of us are already introducing some of this thinking into our lives – listening to podcasts, while washing the dishes, watching a movie, while doing laundry on the mountain, and so on. And of course, some tasks are difficult to turn into pleasant experiences (the only thing I can think of in order to “take photographs to renew my passport” is “put on my favorite shirt”, which will probably become my least favorite shirt. as soon as I see how awful passport photos look).
Plus, when you combine things with, say, children, you need to come up with a way to make the task interesting for everyone.
But I really love the way Semchuk asks herself what her ideal weekend would look like – getting up early, going outside – and then consolidating her maintenance task around that priority.
This could be the real secret here; It’s not so much what you do while doing housework (because let’s be honest, 90% of the time it will be “listening to podcasts”), but how you plan your household chores depending on what kind of life you want to be alive.
Because you never get to the end of your to-do list and say, “Finally, now I can start spending weekends on the street with people I care about.”
So you can prioritize and schedule tasks and chores first to support those priorities.
And along the way, ask yourself if there is a way to make these tasks a little more fun.