How To Effectively Handle Recurring Tasks

Are there any recurring tasks that you tent to avoid, and only do when you are forced to do them? I bet there are at least some.

They say that there are three ways to get something done: 1. Do it yourself, 2. Pay someone do do it, and 3. Forbid your children to do it

Basically this boils down to either doing them yourself or delegatig them to someone else.

Of course, delegating recurring tasks would be the most appealing way to handle them. But what about the tasks that stay with you, that you can’t delegate to someone else for some reason?

Understanding recurring tasks

There are a few problems with recurring tasks of that kind. They often don’t feel that important or useful. And also, they tend to consume an awful lot of time that you feel would be better spent doing something else.

I believe it to be a safe bet that you, too, want to spend as little time and effort on these tasks. So let’s find out how you can realize that.

First let us take a look at those recurring tasks to find out if they are really as unimportant to our life than they look like.

Recurring tasks build the foundation of your life

In my experience, it is the recurring tasks that keep your life together. They are the foundation on which you can build your dream life. You probably won’t have the bandwidth to focus on the big things in your life - your dreams, vision and long term goals - if your day-to-day stuff is out of control. And as long as you are the one to do a recurring task, you better care for it well.

But as I mentioned before, this foundation is like a bottomless pit that can easily consume your whole day - or life. So in order to effectively handle your recurring tasks you must find a way to stay on top while limiting the time you spend on them.

Solution: Timeboxing

I suggest that you use timeboxing on your recurring tasks. There are many different ways you can use timeboxing, but two basic methods in particular will help you with your recurring tasks.

1. Limit the time you spend on a particular task, and do the best job you can in the given time. This helps you with tasks where you normally find no end once you started.
2. You just commit to spending a certain amount of time on a particular task without focussing on outcomes. This is more useful on those tasks that you have a hard time to begin with.

In order to decide how to handle a task, you might ask yourself if you can finish that particular task in a reasonable amount of time.

If the answer is yes, then start a race against time using the first way of timeboxing. So you set a timer to a reasonably short time, and speed through your task until you are done.

I use this often when I work through my inboxes. I scan how many items are in there and then think of how much time I want to spend. Then I speed through as fast as I can, until I reach the bottom. When I have a little more time, I do most of the work on the way, and when my time is extremely limited, most of the things in there get scheduled for later execution.

If you can’t be done in a reasonable amount of time, it is better to not focus on your end goal, but simply put in some time so you can at least do some steps towards your end goal.

I use this approach when doing housecleaning. For example, I set apart an hour, and do as much as I can possibly press into this hour, focussing on tasks that have the greatest overall effect on the cleanliness in our home. Or in spring-cleaning, I set apart perhaps two hours for our living room, focussing on the tasks that I don’t usually do in my normal cleaning routine.

So with timeboxing alone, you can get a lot done in a limited amount of time.

Get on top of areas that are highly out of control

Sometimes, an area is so out of control that it totally overwhelmes you, but you know that you should get it back under your control as soon as possible.

This used to happen with my inboxes: I procrastinated until I had mail and stuff worth of several weeks or months in there, and just starting to get through could totally overwhelm me. I only threw the new mails on top and forgot about it. The pile grew bigger, and the bigger it got, the harder it got for me to even get started.

After some setbacks using only timeboxing as a method, I finally found a solution that worked. I thought “If it could wait for me for two months, it can possibly wait a little longer, can’t it?”

And so I just grabed the whole pile and put it away for later processing, leaving only the freshest stuff in the inbox.

The old stuff was out of my mind, and I had a fresh and motivating start. I timeboxed through what little was left in my inbox (first method) and first focused on building the routine to empty my inbox regularly again. Then I used the second method to work through the relics, and eventually reached the bottom there, too.

Would I have made it if I didn’t reset the area? Probably not. Did I make it after I reseted it? You bet! And every time I lost track again, I used the same method to get going again.

You can apply this same method to every area that you can either reset, or simply forget about the massive backlog. So in housecleaning, you can just forget about how messy your home is, and just focus on one small area that you keep clean and neat, and widen that area until eventually you live in a clean and neat home again.

Build routines to keep control

Instead of brute-force yourself into control, better focus on building habits that support your efforts. So if you want to keep your home clean, maybe you decide to always spend one hour on saturday morning to clean. If you want to regularly empty your inbox, you might do it at the samt time every day (or week, or month…)

Concentrate on one area at a time

And I also suggest that you focus on one area at a time until your habits are stable and won’t break as soon a they get out of your main focus. A month proved to be a good amount of time to stabilize a daily habit.

Remember that if an area of your life got out of control for a certain amount of time, it is likely that you spend at least the same amount of time to get it under your control again. If you do it way faster, you would probably overextend yourself, so keep it slow, but steady.

What area will you get control over now?

Share your experience in the comments. If you have your own way to tackle this kind of tasks, we all are interested in hearing about it.

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