Master what you hate

I stumbled upon George Gritsouk's Human Git Aliases article a while back. Another one of his posts is called Master What You Hate:

I used to hate ironing clothes and merge conflicts, until I got pretty good at ironing clothes and merge conflicts. Some chores are just unfortunate realities of life, or I’m just too proud to outsource them. I can’t bring myself to pay someone to do my cleaning for me, so my near future has a lot of laundry and vacuuming coming up. The best way I found to stop dreading these things is to get as good at them as possible.

One of two things will happen. Either you get good enough at the task to make it fun, or you’ll get fast enough to not notice the pain.

So do your homework. Look it up on YouTube, RTFM, ask a friend, read a book. Buy the right tools for the job. Practice, practice, practice! Be happier and more productive. You always have the option of avoiding the task like the plague down the line.

As happenstance permits, I had a laundry-related "Eureka"-moment recently as well. I hate doing laundry. But once I stopped bitching about it and got a second drying rack, it's gotten much less inconvenient. Instead of fumbling to fit clothes onto my first tightly packed rack, I just drape the other half of them over the second one.

And lest you think I was foolish enough to think this was only about laundry and git, I've also practiced writing law analysis ad nauseam so that it doesn't bother me nearly as much any more.

Note: Since George's site is temporarily down, I've mirrored the content or linked to archival services.