While travelling the world for work or leisure, Rotman professor Claire Tsai Jan noticed a strange phenomenon.

When she took a long-haul flight — for example, U.S. to Taiwan — she noticed she felt relatively content after three or four hours in the air, despite knowing there were over 10 hours left. But after the same amount of time on a continental U.S. flight — say, New York to LA — she noticed she felt anxious and tired, wishing she had already arrived.

The insight reinforced an earlier observation she’d had about course lengths at school, which vary between eight and 12 sessions. Paradoxically, she noticed that she often felt more energized in the first few sessions of the longer course than at the same point in the shorter one.

Both examples represent mundane tasks: routine, usually unexciting, occurrences that are necessary in life. But in their mundanity, Tsai Jan identified an exciting area to explore. She noticed that while the emotional effects of “hedonic” (a.k.a. pleasant) experiences are well-studied in academia, the effects of mundane experiences were not. And given how much of our lives are composed of these routine tasks, it’s an area Tsai Jan felt warranted more attention.

The result is “More done, more drained: Being further along in a mundane experience feels worse,” an in-depth study co-authored with Ying Zeng, Min Zhao and Nicole Robitaille, set to appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The research examines a core contradiction: Why would someone feel more fatigued 20 minutes into a 30-minute meeting than at the 20-minute mark during an hour-long one? Shouldn’t the realization of imminent completion spark joy rather than despair?

Tsai Jan and co-authors executed 10 studies, ranging from straightforward and simple online studies (enduring a boring meeting) to intense and complex field experiments (e.g., surveying travelers confined in a two-week COVID-era quarantine or students throughout a 12-week course). These studies used different types of mundane tasks and varying lengths of time.

The extensive research unveiled a common thread: “relative task completion.” This refers to people’s perception of how much of the total task they have endured, with the emphasis on endured. While common sense might dictate that the person who is 20 minutes into a 30-minute meeting would feel satisfied, in fact, the opposite consistently occurred. People felt that they had endured a lot already, which sparked negative thinking and a desire to be finished. On the flip side, the researchers found that the person who was 20 minutes into a 60-minute meeting felt they had not yet endured very much and therefore felt less negative.

Tsai Jan says these insights are important because everyone endures mundane tasks as a part of daily life. In a business context, mundane tasks are the backbone of workplaces: budgets must be conveyed, safety training imparted and presentations made. It can be tough to capture people’s attention during the communication of these important tasks, but they are vital.

“Tasks like doing homework or corporate work may not be inherently thrilling, but we can make them better and help people feel more positive about them,” Tsai Jan says. “It matters because we often base decisions on predictions of how we think people will feel.”

Knowing takeaways were as important as the insights, the authors distilled their results into three nudges for enlivening the mundane.

First, remind people that their current task is just one of many. “Directing employees’ attention to pending tasks could shift their perception of fatigue or even the difficulty of their current workload. It’s simple yet impactful,” says Tsai Jan. “One thing to try is just quickly highlight what's coming up after the meeting. It could be very unobtrusive, for example, saying, ‘We’re just making sure we're going to stay on track and that we'll get to our next meeting on time.’”

Her example dovetails with the second takeaway, and that’s giving people an “end of day” reminder. This could be as simple as a verbal cue — similar to the example above mentioning the end of the workday or week. Or it could be a quip about ending the day on time so everyone can get home to dinner, thus directing people’s attention to the real end of their day. 

The third takeaway is one that most people are familiar with in theory: Reframing tasks into smaller pieces. A visual example is a PowerPoint presentation that has a distinctly different look for each section. Or designing short meeting breaks with intention, such as calling them “health breaks,” so that people stretch their legs and come back energized for a fresh start. The goal is to reduce people’s perception of how much they have endured and therefore, stave off the negative feelings that accompany it.

“Intentional design like this — whether through agendas, visual progress cues or breaks — could significantly enhance meetings and the experience of those attending them,” says Tsai Jan. “With some creativity and thoughtfulness, these nudges could make even the dullest meetings a bit more effective and engaging.”

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