How To Do Boring Work Fast
Grinding is doing simple (and sometimes hard) things repeatedly to get to a worthwhile goal. It’s generally totally undervalued by smart people, as a strategy for winning. The people you compete with are often smarter than you, but you can win by grinding harder.
As one example of grind at OfferZen, I hand coded HTML pages for all the initial company profile pages based a Google Form they had completed - which allowed us to shave off a week from our launch date.
Get Ready To Grind
- Have a Super Clear Goal - Usually it’s finding something (e.g. a link) or correcting something. I do only that and nothing else - I find it especially dangerous to add opinion/thinking during the process.
- Get Music - Seeing as it’s all about positive mindset, I get music I enjoy and put it loud.
- Work in Timeboxes - give myself a specific period of time (usually 10-20 min) to make some progress.
Pre-Grind
For the first few minutes I operate in an exploratory fashion:
- Testing out ways to grind optimally (e.g. windows side by side vs. swiping between screen, which search engines give best results etc)
- During that time I optimize my process
Grind!
- Constantly think of all the progress you’re making - whenever I get something done I’m thinking “fuck yeah I just got another one”
- Stay positive - sometimes review progress just to see how much I’ve done
- Take frequent breaks - when I do mind-numbing work I often switch it up with something super intellectually straining. That way my brain actually relaxes when I go back to the grind
- Keep Grinding (until you hit your goal)