This is my week to get all of my business paperwork done for Year End 2008 so my accountant can do my taxes.

Any time I find my self resisting a task I need to do, I play a perspective game. I find something to like about it and focus on that before I start doing what I need to do. This is no high-falutin’ spiritual practice, I’ve just found that it goes better.

This one was tough. Doing year-end tax prep is definitely not one of my favorite things to do.

When I took a minute to think about it, I realized that I do love the repetition of doing my accounting. Most of the work I usually do involves continually reinventing something every moment. I don’t have much work that is repetitious.

I also don’t have much work where there are tangible answers. You can really get your hands around these numbers. They are real, and objective. There aren’t very many areas in my life where the answers are so clear.

Two of my three jobs while I was in college were being a ‘reader’ for professors. One was for a sociology professor and one was for a math professor. (I majored in sociology with a minor in math.) My job was to read and grade exams and written assignments.

It was obvious right out of the gate that being a math reader was far more straightforward than being a sociology reader.

While I loved how the sociology job made me think deeply, and come to terms with grading subjectively, I equally loved my math reader job because it was so tangible. There were answers, and I really liked that.

I wouldn’t want repetitious work that has answers all the time, but I noticed that when I appreciated that about doing my taxes, I began to enjoy the soothing nature of repetition. It’s kind of like a meditation.

Filed under: Being a Reinventer, Adventures of a Reinventer, Lynne's Reinvention Journey on February 22nd, 2009