The Joy of Mindless Tasks

I’d do it for free.

Stuffing envelopes, that is. Over the past two nights, I have had the pleasure of a “special project” from my director. These are very often tasks that are best done at night when there is little client interaction so that I can focus on them and let my co-worker work the desk. I enthusiastically accept any and all projects thrown my way.

I’m a brown-noser, I realize.

My thought process is that maybe they will notice all the extra work I am doing and move me into a more skilled position. I think the outcome is that they realize that I don’t have enough to do in my current position and so they’re always ready to laden me with more work.

I have been hand addressing, stamping and filling envelopes and I love it. Doing these kinds of tasks keeps me busy without really having to think ahead or about anything else that is going on in my life. Lately, I have been thinking about a lot, so this comes as a meditative relief to me.

I have often volunteered for organizations doing similar tasks. I even have been compiling an address list of my own to mail out brochures about my mad harp skillz.

I could be a little obsessive-compulsive.

During one of my classes at school this quarter, the instructor brought up an interesting notion. He said that when you study, you should only do it for a few minutes and then go do a mindless task for a bit before returning to study. I have always done this a bit, but I considered it to be a sign of attention deficit disorder. It still could be. He made an suggestion of juggling, which he performed in class – or washing the dishes, which he did not. The theory is that the short-term memory can only retain so much information at once before it caches it away into long-term memory so you need time to process it before piling on more data.

Kind of like a Commodore 64.

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