In this article, I will be telling  you how to become more efficient and get more things done while spending less time feeling bored. Sounds pretty sweet, doesn’t it? I somewhat hesitate on using the term “Getting Things Done” (commonly abbreviated GTD, like you needed an acronym for it), since that tends to be associated with stressing around, using gadgets or fancy methods to keep track of more and more stuff to do but achieving nothing more than an additional information overload.

That kind of GTD is not what this is article is about. This article is about how to become more efficient with the things you are already doing, or wanting to do — down to earth things like how to manage to keep your apartment clean while not spending much time cleaning it.

Some of the advice in this article actually come from my own experiences in that very area — we renovated our kitchen not long ago, and once we started using it again it was an absolute mess. Both me and my girlfriend Emmi were rubbish at keeping things in order, with the predictable result of a complete mess that constantly needed to be cleaned up. Now of course there is a reason this article isn’t titled “How I Learned To Clean my Kitchen” — these tips have a far wider implication than that.

The hows and whys of not getting things done

There are two major reasons things don’t get done — we forget about doing them, or we don’t do them even though we know they need to be done. Most GTD advice focuses on the first reason — they help you organize things so you don’t forget about something and keep reminding you of what you need to be doing next.

The advice there is on the second problem tends to be in the form of book-keeping, listing things and prioritizing. I am sure that can work for some people, and for some things… but the small things that don’t get done are silly to write as a task on a task list (“put away plates from dinner” — once you have bothered to write it down you have probably spent the same amount of time it would have taken to just do it in the first place).

Another problem is that most of these methods are complicated and just do not lead to an enjoyable lifestyle — I want to live my life freely, not feel like I’m my own project manager for the MyLifeProject version 1.0. I intend to give you two easy-to-use tips and ways to think that can improve your efficiency in getting things done without rigid structures, and you will never need a pen. So let’s get into it, shall we?

Never be idle and bored

We all have a fixed amount of time each day to do the things we need to do. Lacking ways to get more time (there are ways, but that doesn’t really belong in this article), the way to get more things done is to make better use of the time you do have.

Yet most people are bored from time to time during their day. You are waiting for something to happen, usually, and you may not even think about it as being bored — you just stand idle for a bit, letting a piece of your day pass you by. Let me go back to the example of my kitchen to show you how this works. The kitchen would inevitably get messy because we were cooking in it. Cooking is one of the most wasteful activities I can think of (other than waiting for a bus or a train) — you wait for some water to boil, let this thing fry for 3 minutes, waiting for the oven to heat up — all that time is wasted while you stand around idly waiting.

Maybe you are starting to realize that the amount of time we are dealing with here is rather small — a minute here, a couple of minutes there. Still, all those minutes add up, and how many minutes do you really need to do something that needs to be done? Not that many. So here is the first of my uncomplicated tips for getting things done.

Tip 1: Do boring things instead of waiting.

Not only does this mean you use up your little pieces of wasted time, you also have less boring things left to do that you need to take other time for doing! In the kitchen example, you could do  some dishes or put some clean dishes away, wipe off the sink or just about anything else — I am sure there is something to do.

This is not restricted to your kitchen, of course. Do something you need to do around the living room instead of sitting around being brain washed by commercials, idly waiting for your show to come back on, for instance. As you get used to living this way, you will find a host of small idle times where this is a benefit. The end result is that you will feel like you are spending less time doing boring things (because you are), and you will still get more things done.

The time is now

My next claim is going to be so blindingly obvious that you will probably want to slap me for stating something so obvious, but at the same time it is so important and often ignored that it needs saying:

The reason things don’t get done is because you put them off.

There is more to this simple statement than you may initially think, though. It says putting things off is the problem, but digging into it, it also means that the problem was putting them off initially, instead of doing them right away. This leads to a question of when to do things. Is there a right time to do something? I claim there is:

Tip 2: The right time to do it is now.

The moment you put something off, you make it easy to justify putting it off some more. This way, things start piling up, and what was an easy task becomes an insurmountable mountain of unfinished things to do. You also give up the opportunity you had to do something, and many tasks tend to grow with waiting time.

Let me take a kitchen example again. I am done cooking, and there’s a dirty pan. I can leave it to go eat, and clean it later — or I can clean it now. If I put it off, the likelihood that I will get up after eating to clean it is small because I have just eaten and I don’t want to stress about fixing the kitchen… I can do it later tonight, right? And later tonight, I can do it tomorrow.

It also means I would need to go back into the kitchen and clean the pan, instead of just staying in the kitchen and doing it now. Finally, the pan would have chilled off, making it harder to clean. The time to do it is now — it only takes a few seconds now.

Another example from my life: After doing the laundry, we can leave the clothes in the bags and deal with them later, or we can put them away in wardrobes and drawers. Leaving them out is tempting, since we are tired from doing the laundry — but it almost surely means they will be left out until the next time it is time to do the laundry.

We would have to place the bags so they are not in the way, so we lost the opportunity to do it easily. And in our case, clean laundry would be a favourite place for our cats to sleep — so maybe we even need to clean off a layer of fur before putting the clothes away.

Small changes, big results

I have combined these two tips to great effect. Doing the boring chores when I would be bored waiting for something takes care of many things, so I don’t feel that I need to interrupt what I am doing to do chores — I can spend more time doing things I like to do. Doing the remaining things right away also means I feel less interrupted.

The biggest problem is that most of us become experts at putting things off — especially things we don’t like to do. It requires a conscious effort to break this cycle, but doing so has great benefits. Try to catch yourself when you are idle and waiting for something. Then simply look around. If there is anything that needs to be done nearby, do it immediately. It doesn’t sound like much of a change, but the effect on your life can be dramatic.

I find the second tip easy to remember as a mantra. Whenever I start thinking of putting things off, I think to myself “the time is now”. The more you repeat this to yourself, the more naturally it will come to act on it. Even if there are times when you just don’t have the energy for something, sticking to these tips most of the time makes everything easy, because when you do put something off, there’s one thing put off — not a pile of things.