A time for Mindless Tasks

I do not like to be idle. If I were to be confined in a room for a long time, I would need activities and I need different category of activities subject to my mood and concentration capacity which is very much determined by environment and emotional moods. So, if I know that I am going to be away for a long time or stuck in a certain place, I need to bring my own activities to calm my nerve and help me pass the time.

Even in a very uneventful medical appointment, I will bring a book (optimistic), broadband to surf on my Ipad (moderate optimistic) and hand phone (pessimistic), at least I can delete duplicated contacts and delete photos.

Recently, I have learnt how useful "Mindless Tasks" or mundane chores are for a prolonged boredom when you are stuck in a place that you are unwilling to be in. These are the tasks you will never do at home when there are one hundred other active tasks you can do. These are the tasks you keep deferring them as they are noble ideas but not urgent or very important. Sure, life is better with them completed but they also can have no bearing in living.

Here are some of the "Mindless Task" which I find such a joy to see the results and feel much better after doing them.

1. Cleaning up Phone's Data - from contacts list, Whatsapp messages, Videos, Images. Take a good look at each one and delete all redundant, useless, offensives information. Reorganise the contacts information to be more search able for yourself, such as put Family Surnames before all your family member, Abbreviation for Colleagues, Church, Volunteers groups. Once, I spent the whole day doing this and my phone battery was flat before sunset. 
2. Sorting and re-writing your favourite recipes into new Notebooks with Categories to separate them. Although I love to get recipes from Internet, Mr Google but once I find my favourite recipes, I used to write them down and for future reference. I spent one whole day copying from my old torn notebook all the recipes that I torn from the old Notebook. It was so satisfying experience. I used different colour codes for Ingredients and Methods. 
3. Read an Easy Joke Book or Simple Story with messages. I find reading heavy stuff required a lot of thinking and challenging the thoughts process. If you are emotionally not very happy and the environment likely make you upset too, then you most likely cannot read heavy stuff books. Light reading is the best. 
4. Check your Social Media Settings and test them out. Sometimes, settings have been changed and you have forgotten you have linked Facebook to Twitter or once you pin something in Pinterest, it will show up in Facebook. Or you post in Blog through Ipad, it directly post in your Google + account. Things that you have no time to check, this is the best time to check, provided you have internet access. 
5. Catch up with all "Likes", "Saved" and "Share" linkages in your Facebook or videos and messages given in Whatsapp. Those that you like, you could download them or reshare them somewhere. Those that you do not like, it is time to delete them. Time to catch up with the reading too. For recipes on Facebook or Internet, its time to copy them down so that when you wish to cook or bake, you can find them in hardcopy.  
6. Clear out the Draft posts in your blogs (if you are a blogger). Sometimes you started to write something, then the idea just left and the blog post would be left hanging as draft for years. Its time to tidy them up and delete where necessary. 
7. This one requires some deep thinking but not really mindless tasks but it can be rather mundane tasks for busy people. To go through life and plan for the next 5 to 15 years to come. It can be just simple, list them for each child or spouse, what you like them to be doing in the next 5-10 years time, what activities to do together with you and what are realistic to achieve. After a while, you get an entire life mapped out with time frame and objectives. It is certainly very eye-opening to realise as your child is growing up, you are aging along the path. Doing an exercise like this, help us to realise how vulnerable life is and how fast our kids grow. They will soon out-grow us.