How often do you catch yourself thinking, “I’ll be able to relax when I’ve finished this”? I do it all the time. I tell myself I’ll be able to relax and really enjoy myself once I’ve fixed X, Y, and Z around the house, filed my taxes, painted the front porch, lost 20 pounds, cleared out the cupboards, answered all my emails, and finally got on top of the paperwork. Somehow, I’ve convinced myself that a happy life is waiting for me on the other side of a completed to-do list.
The list never seems to end. And that, of course, is the trap. There is always something else to do. If we make living a happy life dependent on getting everything done, we can spend our entire lives waiting for a day that never actually comes. A big part of learning to be happy is accepting that life is never going to be finished. Something will always need attention.
The question is whether we can enjoy our lives while we’re dealing with those things, instead of telling ourselves we’ll be happy once everything is finally sorted out. This is especially important when it comes to all the mundane jobs that make up everyday life. Part of creating a happy life is learning that those ordinary moments don’t have to be put on hold while we deal with everything else.
We tend to divide our days into two categories: things we want to do and things we have to do. The things we want to do are where we imagine happiness lives. The things we have to do are simply obstacles we need to get through before we can get back to enjoying ourselves. But what if we changed our relationship with the things we have to do?
I’ve always liked the way Marie Kondo approaches cleaning. There is something almost meditative about watching her get down on her hands and knees and carefully wipe a floor. I don’t imagine she’s thinking, “I absolutely love cleaning floors!” She’s just there, doing the thing in front of her.
That idea has stayed with me. You don’t have to turn every boring task into an exciting experience. You don’t have to convince yourself that you secretly love cleaning the bathroom, doing your taxes, or sorting through paperwork. But you can stop making the experience harder than it needs to be.
I learned this lesson rather dramatically during my divorce. There was an enormous amount of paperwork to deal with. (And when I say enormous, I mean it felt a little like doing your taxes one hundred times in a single year.) There were forms to fill out, financial information to gather, documents to find, things to check, things to sign, and things to send off. And then there were more forms. It seemed endless.
I dreaded it. Paperwork has never been one of my strengths. If I can delegate an administrative task, I generally will. But this was paperwork I couldn’t really hand over to someone else, and I knew I was going to be dealing with it for well over a year.
Eventually, though, I realised something. My dread was making the whole thing worse. The actual task wasn’t particularly difficult. I wasn’t digging ditches. I wasn’t doing anything physically painful. Most of the time, I was simply sitting at a desk and completing a form. But I had wrapped the task in so much mental resistance. Anxiety. Frustration. Fear. Dread. And I was experiencing all of those things before I’d even started.
None of them made the paperwork easier. So I decided to stop adding them. I started approaching it more neutrally. This needs to be done. I’ll sit down and do it. I’ll deal with one thing at a time, and then I’ll move on.
I also started focusing on how I would feel when it was finished. Instead of thinking about how much I hated doing the paperwork, I thought about the freedom that would come when it was finally behind me. Every form I completed was one less thing between me and the end. That was a much better place to put my attention.
After about a year and a half, I was, if not exactly a paperwork enthusiast, at least a little better at it. And I’d learned something important. The paperwork itself wasn’t nearly as burdensome as the mental resistance I’d built around it.
I see the same thing happen with my coaching clients. One client, Sarah, came to me because she was constantly putting off dealing with her finances. She ran a small business and had allowed several months of bookkeeping and financial administration to pile up. Every time she thought about it, she felt overwhelmed. She told me she was “terrible with numbers” and that getting everything organised would take forever.
The longer she avoided it, the bigger the task became in her mind. When we actually looked at what needed to be done, it was much less frightening than the story she’d created around it. There were receipts to organise, invoices to reconcile and some records to update.
It wasn’t particularly complicated. What was exhausting her was thinking about it. So rather than telling herself she needed to learn to love bookkeeping, I suggested she try something else. Stop arguing with the task. Stop telling herself how awful it was going to be. And stop waiting to feel motivated. Just do the next piece.
She started with twenty minutes a day. She’d put on some music, sit down, and deal with whatever was directly in front of her. She also started thinking about how she wanted to feel when she was finished: relieved, clear-headed, and confident about where her business stood.
Within a couple of weeks, the mountain had become a series of manageable little hills. The interesting thing is that bookkeeping hadn’t suddenly become fun. She didn’t wake up one morning thinking, “Wonderful! I get to reconcile invoices today!” What changed was her relationship with it. She was no longer carrying the task around in her head all day. And that made a huge difference.
Think about something you’ve been putting off. Maybe it’s your taxes, or maybe there’s a cupboard you’ve been meaning to clean out. Maybe you need to make a difficult phone call. Or maybe there’s a pile of paperwork sitting somewhere that you’ve been deliberately ignoring. How long will the actual task take? And how long have you already spent thinking about how much you don’t want to do it?
Sometimes a job takes thirty minutes, but we carry it around in our heads for three days. We worry about it, we feel guilty about it, we avoid it. Then we remind ourselves that we really should be doing it. The task has become much bigger emotionally than it is practically.
So what would happen if you removed some of that extra emotion? Instead of: “Oh no, I have to do my taxes.” Try: “I’m doing my taxes this afternoon.” There’s something surprisingly calming about that shift. You don’t have to enjoy the task. You just have to do it.
This is one of the reasons I’ve always liked Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are. His approach to mindfulness isn’t about escaping ordinary life. It’s about becoming more present to it. That’s a useful idea when you’re washing dishes, folding laundry, cleaning the floor, or doing paperwork. You don’t have to be somewhere else mentally. You can just be there.
None of this means you have to find every ordinary task fascinating. That’s not the point. The point is that you don’t have to spend the whole time wishing you were doing something else.
There’s another part of this that helped me during my divorce. I could focus on the dread. I could think about how much paperwork there was, how long it was taking, and how much I hated having to deal with it. Or I could focus on freedom. The freedom of having it finished, of moving forward, of knowing that something difficult was finally behind me.
That didn’t mean pretending the process was pleasant. It wasn’t. It simply meant giving my mind somewhere better to go.
We can do the same thing with so many of life’s mundane jobs. If you’re clearing out a room, imagine how good it will feel to walk into a space that isn’t cluttered. If you’re dealing with your finances, think about the relief of knowing where you stand. And if you have a difficult conversation to have, think about the clarity you might have afterwards. The task doesn’t have to become wonderful; your relationship with the task can simply become lighter.
This matters because so much of life is made up of ordinary things. Cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen, paying bills. Doing laundry, answering emails. Emptying the dishwasher, filing documents. If we spend our days rushing through all of these things while waiting for the “real” part of life to begin, we may miss a surprisingly large part of our actual lives. And that is one of the foundations of a happy life: learning to notice and appreciate the life that is already happening in the middle of all those ordinary tasks.
Of course, I am not suggesting that we should simply accept everything about our lives. By all means, change what isn’t working. Paint the porch. Change careers. Lose the weight if you want to. Sort out your finances. Declutter the house. Have the difficult conversation. There is enormous satisfaction in making things better. But you don’t have to postpone living a happy life until they are better.
You can paint the porch and enjoy being outside while you do it. Sort through your paperwork with a cup of coffee beside you. Clean the kitchen and appreciate the satisfying feeling of a clean worktop. You can work towards a goal without making yourself miserable until you reach it.
A happy life is not a life in which everything is finished. It is a life in which we learn to experience happiness alongside the unfinished business. There will always be another thing on the list. So perhaps the question isn’t, “When will everything finally be sorted out so I can be happy?” Perhaps the better question is, “How can I be happy while I sort it out?”
That is a much more useful question. Your life is happening now. Not when the taxes are filed, or when the house is perfect, or when you lose the 20 pounds. Not when every problem has been solved. Now. Because a happy life isn’t something that starts once the list is complete.
If you want practical guidance for creating a life that works better for you, my book Coach Yourself to Success takes you through the process of identifying what matters most, taking care of your needs, setting goals, and making practical changes that move you towards the life you want.
Or you might want to join my Coach Yourself to Success Online Course, which gives you step-by-step coaching, guidance, and resources to help you create your ideal life.
