We all have a to-do list in which there are some items which are at the bottom of table and are mostly ignored.
These items all have two things in common: None of them had a hard deadline, all of them were very, very unpleasant.
These unpleasant tasks do more than clogging up the bottom of to-do lists. They create a humming baseline of anxiety in daily life. The author of an article.in success.com says that a few tasks never fit into packed schedule.
'I could really only think of one way to get them done: invent a fake holiday. It falls on the first Sunday in June, and it’s called National Unpleasant Task Day,' the author says.
The author states that unlike holidays that leave you feeling stuffed and emotionally hungover, NUT Day creates pleasure out of pain.
Explaining what is NUT Day, the author says that it is a specific day of silencing self-nagging—a day of grinning and bearing it.
It is a day of scheduling a physical check-up after years of not seeing the doctor. A day of ridding the gutters of tiny baby trees growing in their thick muck of decaying leaves. A day of finally, unapologetically asking for a raise, the author states.
NUT Day is in many ways the opposite of other holidays:. There are no parties or gifts or representative foods. You don’t spend time preparing for the day; instead, it’s a day of action and accomplishment. Yet the holiday, even though there is certainly an expected degree of discomfort, creates a surprisingly euphoric feeling that grows with every completed task. Unlike holidays that leave you feeling stuffed and emotionally hungover, NUT Day creates pleasure out of pain. And there’s no cleanup afterward.
'My first NUT Day was an unmitigated success: I requested estimates for painting my house, something that sorely needed to be done, but something I had been avoiding for months. It took literally five minutes, and it was gone from my to-do list,' the author points out.
The author lists out the things the author did on NUT day
* I organised my estimated tax slips and envelopes so that they would be ready to mail each quarter. It took literally five minutes, and it was gone from my to-do list.
* I 'fired' a client that didn’t pay enough and whom my business had outgrown. It was unpleasant, but it took literally less than five minutes.
The biggest takeaway from NUT Day was that most unpleasant tasks don’t take much time or effort to initiate. Even larger tasks become much less unpleasant once you find the slightly longer chunk of time to get things started. Finishing the baby book is much easier than starting the baby book.
'My other takeaway was that completing unpleasant tasks in a large bunch is extremely exciting, motivating and esteem boosting. Completing one unpleasant task gives you the energy to start the next, and so on. By the end of the day, I was brainstorming for more before the clock ran out. I didn’t feel like I had been toiling all day. I felt like I could take over the world. What started as an ironic 'holiday' really felt like a celebration,' the author sums up.
