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If you get excited easily about doing lots of interesting things, you probably also experience the side-effect of getting very bored when you're not able to do what you love. But while you can fill up most of your time with varied and interesting things to do, there will always be some times when you have to complete a task that you just don't feel like doing.

If you get excited easily about doing lots of interesting things, you probably also experience the side-effect of getting very bored when you're not able to do what you love. But while you can fill up most of your time with varied and interesting things to do, there will always be some times when you have to complete a task that you just don't feel like doing.

So, what do you do if you are itching to do something fun, but you just have to get this boring thing done because your boss, your coworkers, your family, your friends, your lecturers or a committee you volunteered to help are relying on you? It is not worth being antagonistic, you simply need to get the thing done.

Personally I react very badly to boredom so I know exactly where you're coming from! As a result I have developed a number of coping mechanisms for getting things done so that I can go back to having fun. I apply these skills to job seeking, homework, downtime at work and the dreaded cleaning sprees.

1) Rather than setting a time-based goal, set a task based goal and use a personal project as the reward. Put all your energy into your boring task and do not stop until the task is finished. If you can get into 'the zone' you might even enjoy it!

2) Set yourself up to have fewer boring tasks to do in the first place by delegating the things you have to do that you find uninteresting. You might not be able to delegate away all of your boring tasks, but you can certainly make a good dent on them. For example, if you are really itching to work on some creative projects you could delegate your bookkeeping. If you want to spend your home time tracing your genealogy, hire someone else to clean the house.

3) Ask a friend to help or just to keep you company. Recently I was moving house and I found packing to be a really boring task. A friend offered to come visit a couple of times while I was packing. It was great! I think I packed more things during the time she was visiting than I did on my own for the whole rest of the week.

4) Split your task up into milestones so that you can measure your percentage complete. If you know that you have to make twenty sales calls, or write a three thousand word essay, you have numbers that you can measure against. If feels good to make four calls and know that you're 20% done, or hit word count after writing a couple more paragraphs.

5) Weave a fanciful and amusing storyline around your current task and pretend you are about to embark on an exciting adventure! I've never done this to help with boring tasks personally, but it is suggested by Barbara Sher in her book Refuse to Choose.

6) Crank up the music. When you're doing something boring music can turn it from being a drag to being a disco! Experiment with different styles of music to see what works best in your circumstances. If you need to write, best to keep to non-vocal music.

7) Do two or more different boring tasks at the same time. The alternating of the two boring tasks might add enough variety to make you feel more interested than if you did only one task at a time.

8) Alternate the boring task with an interesting one. As a kid, this was the only way I could get myself to clean my bedroom. I made a pact with myself that if I picked up and put away 10 items I would allow myself to read one page of my book. Then once I had read one page I would have to go and pick up another 10 items before getting to read the next page. It worked! I still do this today when it comes to tidying the house.

9) Use a stopwatch to time how long you take. How quickly can you write an essay or complete a report? Turn on the stopwatch and find out! Then next time you have to do the same thing, see if you can beat your personal record.

10) Use a timer to section off short sprints. Set the timer for 5, 10 or 15 minutes and work as fast as you can during that time. Plan your day so that you can space out enough short sprints to get the whole task done. When I was at university I took a part-time job as a market research interviewer due to the flexible working arrangements, but I got really bored making all the calls as it would take sometimes a hundred calls to get one interview. The work was about 2 hours per day at any time I chose. Instead of doing it all at once which would have driven me crazy, I set up a twenty minute sprint every two hours around my uni homework.

11) Instead of spending all your time doing a boring task, see if you can find a way to set up an automated system for getting the task done. If you succeed it will pay off both now and in the future. For example, I once took a job as a software tester and I hated to do the step-by-step regression tests because I found them to be incredibly boring. Instead, I added value to my workplace by learning how to use an automated testing software package, writing some scripts that would do the specific mouse clicks for me, and then wrote an instruction manual for the rest of the team, teaching them how to write their own automated test code in VBScript!