Mind Games Make the Mundane Manageable
The further along we are in a routine task, the worse we feel. Could reminding ourselves of how busy we are break the boredom?
Mundane experiences are a huge part of our everyday lives. Whether it’s our daily commute, standing in line for coffee or a regularly scheduled work meeting, cleaning, doing laundry or paying bills, these routine and utilitarian activities play a critical – albeit mind numbing – role in our productivity and overall well-being.
While some people maintain there is beauty in the mundane, the reality is that many of us view these tasks as life-sucking, eating up valuable time and attention that could be better spent elsewhere. This cognitive divide reveals there is a lot we don’t know about mundane experiences and our perceptions of them.
Interestingly, we do know that some mundane experiences, such as waiting in line, have been shown to be malleable, influenced by factors such as lighting, music and other environmental and contextual cues. This phenomenon got a group of researchers pondering what other factors contribute to people’s feelings around mundane activities, and how negative feelings that arise might be managed.
While reflecting on their own experience of being on a flight, the researchers made an interesting observation: being two hours into a journey can feel more (or less) tedious depending on whether the overall flight duration is three hours or eight.
“We realized that the same mundane experience could feel very different depending on how much you had completed,” says Nicole Robitaille, an associate professor of marketing at Smith School of Business. “In our research we refer to this as relative task completion.”
Same elapsed time, more boredom
That insight sparked a series of 10 studies into how people’s perceptions during a routine activity can be shaped by their relative task completion. In the workplace, consider two managers attending the same tedious meeting. One believes it will last an hour, the other 30 minutes. “When they are 20 minutes into the meeting,” Robitaille asks, “will their experience be the same?”
To Robitaille and her colleagues — Ying Zeng (University of Colorado Boulder), Claire Tsai (University of Toronto) and Min Zhao (Boston College) — the answer is no. And they had reason to believe that the seemingly irrational way humans judge an experience would explain why the perceptions of the same 20 minutes of a meeting would vary depending on elapsed time and how long a person thinks the meeting would take.
“People are sensitive to how much of an experience they’ve completed,” Robitaille says. “This leads them to infer they have or haven’t endured a lot, which impacts their ongoing experience.”
The researchers built a clever series of lab and field studies to test their hunch. They recruited subway riders returning home at the end of a workday, international travellers stuck in COVID quarantine, managers reliving the experience of attending a dull meeting, university students completing semester-long weekly assignments and adults completing an exercise online tutorial. In some cases, they divided study participants into “forecasters” (such as subway riders waiting on the platform) and “experiencers” (subway riders during the trip); in others, they guided participants to vividly describe details of their experiences and reactions.
When they analyzed the results, the findings pointed in one direction: the same ongoing mundane task (say, data entry for 20 minutes) felt less unpleasant when relative completion was lower; that is, when the task was expected take 60 minutes rather than 30 minutes. It’s about how much we think we’ve bitten off the task at hand.
It was a counterintuitive finding. After all, most of us would assume that we would feel better when more of the mundane task was completed, or that we would feel the same as the person next to us who completed the same amount of the task.
“But in reality,” says Robitaille, “we found that after the exact same amount of a mundane task, people actually feel better when they’re further from the end and their relative task completion is lower, as they infer they have not yet endured a lot. Forecasters, on the other hand, never predicted this effect correctly.”
What about people with a long to-do list for the day? We know from prior work that busy people tend to think about not only the current task at hand but also all of their pending commitments. As a result, being busy causes people to infer that they have only endured a relatively small proportion of all they need to complete, and the mindless job itself would not feel so boring or draining.
Robitaille offers our hapless subway rider as illustration: Two people in a crowded subway are going home at the end of the workday. One has a few virtual business meetings after dinner; the other has no additional responsibilities. In this situation, she says, the busier one would feel less tired at the subway station because the information they use to evaluate their commuting experience would include the evening meetings, making the commute seem like a smaller portion of their total work for the day. The less busy one would feel more tired because the subway commute would be the last task for the day.
The busyness trigger
Fortunately, Robitaille and her colleagues anticipated the one question that you or I would ask of them: Based on these findings, are there ways to make administrative paper pushing or household chores any less tiresome?
Going into their study, they figured that one effective strategy would be to, essentially, remind yourself of your long to-do list. Recall that the perception of busyness can make you feel less bored or cranky while performing a mindless task; your little voice tells you, “I have only endured a little compared with what I have to do today, so I still have something in the tank.”
The researchers tested an end-of-day reminder to trigger this perspective. In one of their experiments, they asked participants to indicate how many hours were left before bedtime. They figured this end-of-day reminder would cause the participants to subtly expand their benchmark from the end of the mundane activity to the end of the day. It worked: Just by changing the individual’s time horizon, the end-of-day reminder made the mundane task less unpleasant to experience.
Robitaille says you can also reframe your thinking about what you have accomplished as a “fresh start” or a new task. Doing so can reduce the feeling that you’ve endured a lot and delay the onset of negative feelings. Robitaille paints the picture: “After lunch, once you’re back at work, rather than thinking that you’ve just completed five and a half hours of your eight-hour day, you can think that you’ve worked 30 minutes of your three-hour afternoon.”
Another option, of course, is to gut it out and suppress the boredom, mind wandering or negative feelings that bubble up while you’re completing routine work activities. That may not be wise. A recently published study suggests that trying to stifle boredom prolongs its effects; before you know it, you’re in a world of productivity pain. The study found alternating boring tasks with meaningful ones helps prevent this spillover effect.
Whatever you decide, it’s worth remembering that mundane moments are part of the human experience—and often essential for our well-being. The least you can do is follow good advice and proactively reframe them for a better experience. Your psyche will thank you at the end of a long day.
