It would be great if everything you always worked on held your interest from start to finish, but that’s rarely the case. The downside of this is that you might start sabotaging the projects that you lose interest in.
When this happens, you might find that you’re making excuses for why the project won’t work. All you can see are potential problems. You talk yourself into doing a sloppy job just to finish or you talk yourself out of doing it at all.
Some people might look for ways to take shortcuts with the project and not care about the end result because they just want to be done with this thing they find so boring. But the problem is that handling a project this way can sometimes nag at your subconscious and you will feel the stress from it whether you realize it or not.
You might procrastinate on getting the job done regardless of whether it’s important because you feel like you can’t stand another second of the boredom. You waste hours or days until it’s crunch time and then you have to get to work but you make error after error because you’re having to rush.
Allowing all the negative issues you can think about for the project to weigh on your mind is another way people sabotage. You criticize the project from one step to the next as your mind wanders.
This exacerbates the desire to quit the work or do a bad job. You might practice overkill on one part of the project because you dislike another part of it. As a result of spending so much time on one part, you can’t finish the next part.
Regardless of what you’re doing to sabotage, the results are that you end up continuing to dread the project or leaving a string of half-finished ones in your wake. In order to complete projects that you find boring, you have to develop some boredom-buster habits.
Make deadlines a reward. When you know there’s something to look forward to at the end of a step or the end of the project, it gives you an internal drive because you’re motivated.
Get curious. When you’re bored with a project, it can be because you find that it doesn’t pique your interest. Look for ways to make the project interesting for you. This might be looking at the project from a different angle, such as researching interesting facts about whatever you’re working on.
Find the creative view. Look at what the project is going to be used for once it’s complete. For example, if you’re working on a project that consumers use, look up sites to see how the customers have used that project. This can spark your interest because it taps into the neocortex or the imagination part of the brain.
