> Like for example manually copy/pasting stuff from your managers Excel sheet into phpmyadmin. This can take you days, and it is really boring. You cannot always quit your job when you got a boring task.
As valuable as accepting inevitable boring tasks is, that seems to leave you not much room to want to automate the task. Does anyone have something deep to say about simultaneously being accepting of your circumstances and seeking ways to improve them?
There is nothing wrong with completing tasks the most efficient way possible.
In this case, the copy/paste action was just the most boring task I could imagine. Please replace this phrase with "a boring task you cannot escape at best will". It's not really about Excel to phpMyAdmin.
I actually have seen a guy doing something like this before years. Thats why it came to my mind. This guy was not a competent programmer. I should have used a different example maybe. But it is not so easy to find a "boring task" which cannot be automated in todays dev world.
Disclaimer: maybe nothing "deep to say", but this is the story which came to my mind, when I wrote the post. In my opinion, Zen has nothing to do with fatalism as might be understood with this example. Go ahead, make things better. I am thinking about replacing this example, because it came back to me several times now.
In any case, thank you for taking the time reading it and asking this question.
The only insight I have is that doing so is a balanced, middle road response (left road is accept everything, right road is change everything). The Serenity Prayer captures this attitude:
As valuable as accepting inevitable boring tasks is, that seems to leave you not much room to want to automate the task. Does anyone have something deep to say about simultaneously being accepting of your circumstances and seeking ways to improve them?