From Chore to Flow™ - Make Work Feel Less Like, Well… Work

In a different article, we discussed how to make your life less boring and achieve more with the Chore to Flow™ idea.

And that’s cool - who would not want to have a dance off cooking dinner with your best mate - but really, having a chat with the office printer on a Thursday morning can make you look a little off.

Chore to Flow™ at work feels impossible, with deadlines set by other people, priorities continually reviewed and the small talk at the watercooler. Even if you don’t work in an office, the here and now of the day will change everybody’s plans and make the process of completing tasks memorable feel impossible.

This is unless you start taking your life back.

Make Work Fun Again!

Whether you are helping someone grow, igniting change, saving a life or building a wall, work should not be BORING. And no, you should not motivate yourself only with little sweets at task completion (think about your health…) or a trip to the mall. While prizes are useful for short term, tactical decisions, they do not work for the long term.

Especially if you, like me, work with someone who is neurospicy.

You need to make the process itself engaging, meaningful, or emotionally satisfying so that you’ll love doing your work chores, again and again.

Let’s start with gamification, the way eeverybody else is talking about it.

Gamify your progress

Turn a mundane task creating weekly content for social media into a “mission”. Assign playful names to tasks (e.g., "Project Wise Woman" for blog articles) and create a mental or visual "progress bar" by breaking the task into stages. Celebrate each stage with a quick victory dance or a funny phrase like, "Dust defeated, level up." No one needs to see you doing it - look at you, you superhero with a secret super identity!

Tell yourself a story

Go back to your childhood, and while working on a repetitive task like data entry, imagine you’re a detective piecing together clues for a grand mystery. Narrate your progress in your head or quietly aloud, e.g., “Holmes uncovers another critical piece of evidence, taking him closer to unravel Moriarty’s foul plan”.

And if crime is not your thing, make it a fantasy adventure through the lands of Excel. The point here is to transform a task into an immersive narrative.

Engage you senses

Put your playlist on random, or create a new one called “killing it” with uplifting or favourite music. Match the tempo to the task’s pace, do a little dance like nobody is watching and own it! If you have the capabilities, light a scented candle or use an essential oil diffuser to create a pleasant atmosphere.

Worried about what your colleague, your neighbour or your partner will say if they see you jamming while smashing tasks?

That’s their problem. Ask them to join in, everyone needs a break.

See the change happening

We are visual animals, and forget often how much we have done to arrive here. So for long-term project, like writing a report, mark milestones with a creative action. After finishing a section, doodle a small symbol (e.g., a star or smiley face) on a sticky note and place it on your workspace as a badge of progress.

You will be able to see how far you have come, without immediately thinking about all the work you still need to do. Here, we look at the progress SO FAR. You started from zero!

Share it

Have a Slack channel? A work chat? A community of likeminded professionals you like to hang out with and a whatsapp group is formed, somehow?

Instead of sharing links to your social media and invite each other to buy within the network, why not sharing a quick, proud update about your task completion in a group chat and make it a “epic refurbishment saga”? If forms a narrative, it tells people more about what you are doing and how you are doing it, and ties the action to positive emotions.

Theatrical Flourish

My favourite. I work from home and it can get oh so boring. Sometimes when I make a mistake the world starts spinning because there is no one else to share the issue with, and the solution. I found on the internet the suggestion of a lady, who shouts “And, scene!” and bows to an imaginary audience every time something negative happens, and can’t get enough of it.

Try to stand up, strike a dramatic pose, and declare, “The inbox is conquered!” in a theatrical voice after finishing sending emails next time, and let me know how it goes.

These methods work by embedding joy, creativity, or meaning into the task itself. You are actively engaging with even the most boring of tasks using your imagination, your senses and your relationships to make them not only yours, but rewarding.

We need some humor and positivity to survive our day, so let’s make achieving objectives fun, not only intentional. And who knows, maybe even compliance becomes the funniest part of your day!