How to Make Hard Seem Easy

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About 50% of American workers report spending the majority of their day on menial tasks - highly repetitive, boring actions that don't require any real decision-making or problem-solving (Clifford, 2016).

It's what leads to the breaks to search the internet, doom-scrolling, quiet quitting, and the many other pithy terms we've used recently to describe the withdrawal from boring work.

Yet, these same tasks require a good deal of concentration, skill, and mental strength. In fact, boring tasks can often be the most challenging - it requires sustained effort and attention to something simple, which can be very taxing for those of us (read: all of us) who enjoy novelty and use that as a source of stimulation.

To make things even more complicated, we might prefer these boring tasks. People tend to shy away from difficult tasks. We're more likely to engage in something if it's easier (Song & Schwarz, 2008). The way we think about what we're doing - our perception - shapes our motivation, satisfaction, and ultimately, performance. When we think what we're about to do is hard, we get a host of unproductive behaviors that even the highest performers struggle with, like procrastination, avoidance, ostriching (burying our head in the sand), and sometimes, downright escapism (like using a "sick day" to get out of work).

This preference for the easy over the hard limits our our ability to achieve our full potential. In fact, some of the greatest performers in any industry separate themselves simply by being willing to do the things that nobody else will do - even if those things are not all that tough.

This is the CEO who goes the extra mile in all their fundraising pitches and sends follow-up emails, while competitors just send a deck.

It's the athlete who engages in deliberate practice and self-regulated learning, rather than blindly following the training plan on any given day.

What if we could make the hard seem easy?

Is more always more?

It makes sense that we'd believe that adding more tasks to our existing set - like extending our to-do list or bolting new features onto an existing product - would take more effort. When we spend more time to complete something, it's natural to believe that more time means greater effort. Is that view always right?

Research suggests that things like order, timing, and difficulty play a large part in whether or not we see things as easy or hard (Lai, Sevilla, Isaac, Bagchi, 2023).

A bias toward averaging

People have a bias toward averaging, rather than adding, multiple inputs when they form an overall judgment. When we eat pizza, wings, and a salad, we tend to mistakenly estimate a lower caloric intake than just one of those unhealthy foods alone (Chernev & Gal, 2010). In other words, we give ourselves a bit too much credit for adding on the healthy choice and use that information to drag down our estimates, rather than than correctly (and more simply) adding the calories together.

This bias toward the average may allow us to make hard things seem easy.

Rather than simply adding the task difficulties together, we might weight tasks differently based on the overall volume of tasks.

Interestingly, this bias seems to be minimized when people fail to categorize. In other words, if you consider everything on your list as just “stuff that has to get done,” you’ll correctly add, rather than average, task difficulty. But, if you categorize into easy and hard, you can make the harder seem easy by pulling your perception closer to the average - when we categorize, that’s what we do.

Primacy and Recency

We also know that people tend to disproportionately weigh their perceptions of earlier and later items in a sequence. We remember things that we do first (primacy) and last (recency), and those effects ("serial position effects") shape our overall perception of whatever it is we are doing.

These effects are why you want to go either first or last in a talent show, set of presentations, or tryouts for sport. You're more likely to get forgotten in the middle. Evaluators are humans, and humans have pretty bad long-term memory and only a limited capacity of what they can hold in mind in the short term.

These same effects might also influence our perception of the work that we do. If we start or finish with harder things, we might see the task as more challenging than they actually are. If we bury the tough tasks in the middle and bookend with easier tasks, we may find that we see the overall project as easier to complete.

The Peak-End Rule

As if the combination of averaging bias, and primary and recency biases, is not enough to alter our perception, consider the addition of the peak-end rule.

This psychological process says that we end up remembering our experiences based both on what’s most emotionally intense and how things end. As a result, when we evaluate retroactively, we’re more likely to anchor our judgments in these two aspects of the experience, rather than taking a more balanced and nuanced view. The end result may be ascribing too much, or too little, effort to what we achieve, making it more or less likely we’ll take on a similar task in the future.

Combining our biases to make the hard seem easy

Lai and company (2023) found a novel way to combine these biases to make the challenging tasks we take on seem easier. They found that if you add easier tasks to a string of challenging tasks, and categorize them into easy and hard, you can change your overall perception of the work you put in. Amazingly, in their research, this effect - termed the easy addendum effect - was found for physically challenging tasks, mentally challenging tasks, and incentivized tasks. By simply adding easy tasks to the end of the hard work you do, you can make the hard seem easy, and be more productive. What's more, these additions also seem to impact the way we feel about the tasks we've completed. When we add easy tasks to the end of a string of more difficult tasks, we tend to be more persistent in finishing and rate the overall experience as more engaging and enjoyable.

Putting the Easy Addendum Effect into Practice

If you're a coach, leader, or high-performer, you want to leverage this effect to not only get more work done, you want to make the hard seem easy so that you or your team does the work time and again.

Here are the steps you can take to make this effect work for you:

1. Categorize the tasks into easy and hard tasks. Hard may be a function of time, skill, concentration, or something else.

2. Encourage completion of the difficult tasks first, with a string of easy tasks at the end.

3. When coaching or giving feedback, provide reminders of the difficulty of the tasks at the beginning, and the ease of tasks at the end.

By categorizing and sequencing the tasks you or your team does, you can make the hard seem easy.

Source:

Lai, E. Y., Sevilla, J., Isaac, M. S., & Bagchi, R. (2023). The easy addendum effect: When doing more seems less effortful. Journal of Applied Psychology.