

Ask HN: How can I trick myself into enjoying tedious tasks? - coryl

I'm currently interning at an analytics company, and part of my work is low-level tasks like going through customer accounts, logging some figures in a spreadsheet, etc. Low skill, repetitive tasks. Outsourcing this isn't an option because we have sensitive data.<p>How can I trick/hack my brain into tolerating this until  completion? I know that dreading it and mentally complaining about it every second will only make it worse. Maybe rewarding myself with a bite of chocolate after every completion? Any psychological hacks?
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arctangent
I'm currently working on a project that requires quite a bit of manual text
file manipulation - I am literally removing words from a 125k word dictionary
that I "don't like".

To pass the time while I do this I have been watching some old TV shows in the
corner of my monitor. Normally I'd listen to music while coding but having
something familiar and amusing to half-watch while I crawl through this text
file is working for me.

