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)