Powering Through The Mundane

So, in returning to my customary format. I would like to discuss one of those things people hate about work. This isn't referring to the "bad day" at the office. In my opinion what is much worse than the bad is the unrelentingly boring activities. This will lead into a future post, but it is something that I am sure that many people must deal with in the name of "interning".

What do we do with tasks that insanely boring?

This is quite the separate issue from spare time, which was addressed in a different post. In my particular internship I get loaded with a lot of data entry from time to time. This is quite often awful, but it is a necessary evil of working with data. Initially, I can keep myself busy with trying to understand the nature of the data and the phenomenon to be measured. After that, I typically pose a series of questions (or comments) regarding the collection method, survey methods, wording, and other technical matters of reasonable importance. Finally, after many of the technical issues are brought to light, and concerns are voiced that will affect analysis, comes the beast. This comes that critical point where all of the data just need to be entered. The time comes to listen to some internet radio or the iPod, and just get through the beast. It is no treat to have to do these things but usually some music will help me through it.

In most professions there are those duties that are either extremely time consuming or mind numbing. They are those things that we do that remind us that we are "at work". I have been in situations where these activities are nice because you can just put your brain on auto-pilot and still get paid for it. In other situations, uninteresting, boring tasks are simply irritating and time-consuming. Either way, i have come to expect it as part of the world that we live in. How, do you, my over-worked, underpaid chums deal with this issue?