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If you're anything like me you have a long list of things you'd like to do and you're always busy working on things you enjoy. But then what happens when you're stuck doing something you don't want to do? People who get very passionately excited also tend to get very frustratingly bored if being held back from what they want to do.

If you're anything like me you have a long list of things you'd like to do and you're always busy working on things you enjoy. But then what happens when you're stuck doing something you don't want to do? People who get very passionately excited also tend to get very frustratingly bored if being held back from what they want to do.

So how do you deal with the fact that there are so many fun things to do but you just have to get this boring task done. You can't just ditch it because your boss, your coworkers, your family, your friends, your lecturers or a committee you volunteered to help are relying on you. You can't find anyone else to do it and its just got to be done now!

Here are a number of ideas that you can use to get past your next bout of boredom. I personally hate being bored so I use one or a combination of these things all the time.

1) Set yourself a task-based goal with a personal project as the reward. Put all your energy into your boring task immediately and do not stop until the task is finished. As soon as you are finished the boring task indulge in your personal project to your heart's content.

2) Reduce the number of boring tasks you have to do in the first place by delegating them to someone else. You might not be able to get rid of everything that is boring, but if you give delegating a go you might be surprised at what you can let go. When it comes to personal tasks like ironing and cleaning you will need to pay someone, but at work you might even find some willing takers, and your good delegation skills could end up getting you a promotion!

3) Ask a friend for help or just to keep you company. Recently I was moving house and a friend offered to come by and visit while I packed. It was a great idea! Having someone to talk to while I packed made the time go so much faster and kept me busy working, far more than if I was alone.

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) Here's an idea from Barbara Sher in Refuse to Choose. She suggests you can turn your task into part of an imaginary drama or storyline and amuse yourself silly with it! Pretend your task is part of a lead-up to an exciting adventure or mystery!

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) Double up. Have two boring tasks to do and the first one is taking you long enough already? Alternate them. The alternating of the two tasks might add enough variety to pick things up a bit.

8) Alternate your boring task with a fun one. This was the only way I could make myself clean my room as a kid (actually, I still use this technique for cleaning the house!). I would set myself the goal of picking up and putting away 10 items and then I would read just one page of whatever book I was into at the time. I would desperately want to read the next page, so then I would go and pick up and put away another 10 things.

9) Get a stopwatch and make it a challenge for yourself. How quickly can you write that 2000 word essay? Turn on the stopwatch and find out! Then next time see if you can beat your own personal record :)

10) Athletes use interval training to do short bursts of high energy activity. You can use it to do short bursts of getting boring things done! Just setup a timer for 5, 10 or 15 minutes and work as fast as you can during that time. Work out how long the total task will take you and slot the sprints in around your other activities. I use to do that when I worked from home as a telephone researcher when I was at uni. I would do six sprints a day of 20 minutes each whenever it was most convenient for me. I never had to put up with two-hour blocks of tedious phone calling, but still got the work done.

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!