The motivational power of humilitude

What percentage of your daily activities would you say are pointless?

Has your to do list become a parking lot for all of your uninteresting and inconsequential tasks?

If so, you’re not alone.

There was a recent survey of two thousand businesspeople that revealed the average worker spends over two hours a day on this kind of stuff. Thirty minutes grappling with failing technology here, thirty more minutes on paperwork here, another thirty minutes on manual processes here, thirty more minutes at meetings here, etc.

Add them up, and workplace inefficiencies cost companies thousands of hours and millions of dollars each year.

Now, managers are trying their damndest to get people to put effort into tasks they find boring.

*Some frame menial tasks differently so that they’re imbued with a greater purpose.

*Others introduce a spirit of competition between coworkers to make it more engaging.

*While others make charitable contributions part of the action.

*Another technique is called temptation bundling, where people combine an activity they’re procrastinating on with something more enjoyable.

And when all else fails, you can simply bribes people to get mundane work done.

It’s amazing how fast people finish expense reports when there’s a free mochaccino in their future.

I’m reminded of our old director of finance, who sent out her monthly email reminder for team members to complete their client time tracking reports. She knew everybody hated doing them, since crunching those numbers was beyond tedious.

But since we were an ad agency performing a managed service, those hour logs were literally how our firm made money.

She decided to try motivating people through fear. At the bottom of each memo, she started including a different picture of her smashing something with a bat.

Along with a caption that read:

If you don’t finish your report, I will come for you.

That’s what I call creative motivation.

Unfortunately, our team’s completion rate on time tracking reports didn’t increase with her new strategy. Although the open rate on her monthly emails was close to a hundred percent.

She really seemed to enjoy smashing things. Maybe an anger management classes would have been smarter.

Anyway, nobody seems to have cracked the motivation nut when it comes to the boring or inconsequential tasks.

My theory is, they’re not framing the problem properly. The managers of the world are being economical and emotional, but they need to be existential. Diving into the heart of what it means to be human.

Let me share a technique that’s kept my own insanity at bay. It’s called humilitude.

Anytime I’m confronted with a pointless task, whether it’s at the office or at home, I pause to ask myself one question:

Aren’t you lucky that you even have tasks to handle every day? Because think about the alternative. Have you ever been unemployed before? The lack of income hurts, but it’s the boredom that will kill you. Feeling like you don’t matter is the worst. You’re just sitting there all day like a broken clock, with nowhere to go and all of the time in the world to get there. And somewhere around the seventieth job application that you fill out, you find yourself thinking, wow, having a job filled with pointless tasks sounds pretty damn good right about now.

The same goes with relationships.

Next time your partner does something that make you want to murder them, just remember, it’s better having someone to kill then hurting for someone who will.

That’s some serious existential motivation. It’s not a fear of death, but a love of life.

This question has had a profound influence on my ability to motivate myself in the face of mundanity. It fills me with a profound sense of gratitude and humility, hence my little name, humilitude.

Aren’t you lucky that you even have tasks to handle every day?

You’re goddamn right you are. Filling out expense reports, sending client newsletters, attending boring team meetings, doing the dishes, cleaning up dog poop, all this stuff is just fantastic.

What a gift to be able to do these things every day. Not everyone is so lucky.

Listen, there is no escaping life’s pointlessness. We’re all rolling the rock up the hill for eternity.

The question is how creative we can get at making meaning in spite of it all.

How lucky are we to be doing this thing, right here, right now, moving towards something?