Barış Alhan

From time to time, I have some tasks on my plate that are:

1. Very boring
2. Something I really don’t want to do
3. I cannot delegate due to various reasons
4. Extremely critical to get done
5. Weeks long

They’re the opposite of the work I love. I love the creative part: iterating on the product, shaping ideas, figuring out what to build next. Instead, these tasks are more about pure execution & pushing through, not creating.

• At work: pushing a big deal through the client’s legal/security/finance teams, responding to a statement of work, negotiating contract terms, or a strategic decision I keep parking
• In personal life: tax filings, visa applications, chasing a government office for one missing stamp, or a big life decision I keep postponing – like where to live

Lately, these tasks have been showing up much more often. My default was to put them off as long as I could, and that has been hurting both my life and my career. So I started facing them head-on and pushing through, even when it’s painful. Along the way, I found a few principles that make it much easier to make progress and keep my mind calm and organised.

Principle 1: There will always be a boring task, and it’s very often the bottleneck

• There will always be a boring, operational task that becomes the bottleneck of whatever you’re running, whether that’s a company or your personal life. Sometimes it’s a process you have to push through, like a visa application. Sometimes it’s a decision you have to make, about the business or about your life.
• These tasks are easy to delay because putting them off rarely costs anything in the short term. But you will 100% face the downside eventually. And more importantly, getting them done faster has an upside of its own. So this isn’t only about protecting yourself from the downside. It’s about chasing the upside.

Principle 2: Block the time (for boring tasks), regularly

• Once you assume the task will always be there, the next logical move would be blocking time for it.
• These tasks rarely need much creativity. There’s no R&D risk, no technology risk, no product risk. It’s pure execution. So the best predictor of when it gets done is simple: how many minutes you put in each day, and how many hours in total. I’m over-simplifying, but I started to observe more and more that it holds most of the time.
• Start small and ramp up: 15 minutes a day, then 30, then 1.5 hours. Commit to the time no matter what, and deal with whatever comes up inside that slot. It moves much faster than you’d expect.

Principle 3: Getting boring tasks done is a muscle

• The more you do it, the easier it gets. This used to be my weakest skill. Now it keeps getting better because I know I can push through the boring parts that matter most.
• Measuring the time helps psychologically too. It hooks you to a metric, so you feel progress even on days when the task itself barely moves. Sometimes that feeling is false, but it keeps you going. And when you look back, the pain has a number on it: it was just 3 hours. That makes the next session much easier to face.

Principle 4: The cost of delay compounds (especially if it is the most critical thread)

• Recently, a task like this took me about five weeks. When I measured it, the actual work added up to just 20 hours. I wasn’t blocked. With more focus and more pain tolerance, I could have finished it in a week.
• One week versus five is a huge difference. This task was unlocking many others downstream, so every week I delayed it pushed all of them back too. On top of that, I waited too long to even start. When you’re stuck on a bottleneck, the cost grows exponentially.
• So does it really matter how painful the task is if I am honest about the cost?

None of this makes boring tasks fun. It just makes them more manageable. Accept that they’ll always be there, give them time every day, and stop pretending that delaying them is free. The creative work I love only moves as fast as the boring work that unblocks it.