How To Love Doing Grunt Work

What no one tells you about quantitative work, is how much time you will spend doing data pre-processing. I saw someone tweet about it the other day.

These were some of the responses:

It’s so bad sometimes that it can be 80% of the job!

People dislike data pre-processing because it is grunt work. If you look up the definition of grunt work, you will come across words like menial, boring, hard, thankless, uninteresting, basic, difficult, routine, strenuous, tedious, repetitive—you get the idea. You will also come across words like necessary, and important. Grunt work is a necessary evil for success.

I once saw a TikTok of a mother complaining that her little boys had come home muddy from playing outside. The comment section admonished her, of course. “Boys will be boys!”, everyone chorused. I don’t have kids yet, but when I do, I hope to God they come home very filthy from playing outside all day. That will be a sign of a day well spent. It will show me that they are thoroughly enjoying their childhood; forming those core memories, exploring, learning, and growing all the more. Most importantly, it will show me that on that particular day at least, they were very happy. Isn’t that all you want as a parent?

Playing in the mud and doing grunt work are not exactly opposites, but they are far apart enough to be juxtaposed as such. You could probably table their differences like so:

The key difference is that one is a lot of fun, and the other makes you want to jump out of a window. I insist that if you have the means, and can find someone suitable, you should always delegate such work. If for no other reason then for the economy, at the very least.

Anyway, much as I don’t enjoy grunt work, I’m still usually quite happy to do it. I have a different conception of it which helps, and I thought I might share it.

For starters, I don’t think of it as doing grunt work, but “playing in the mud” or “doing mud work”. It is some sort of hybrid between the two: work that is also play, can be done by adults or kids, for enjoyment but also to facilitate success, and if you do or don’t do it, whether you get in trouble depends on your specific situation. Here is how it all fits in our table.

In art, there is something called the “ugly stage”, which is when your soon-to-be masterpiece looks like total crap. It’s not a skill issue but a part of the process—though if you are just starting out, the finished thing may still not be much of a looker. Many budding artists get discouraged at this stage because things look—well, ugly. Yet more discouraging is how slow progressing through it usually is. Of course seasoned artists will tell you that you have to power through, but it’s easier said than done…

I’m sure you have a similar analogy to think of. Whatever you are really good at, try and recall a time when you sucked at it. Maybe it took grunt work, maybe it took mud work, but after some time and effort, you didn’t suck at is as much. You somehow got from A to B, whether you came kicking and screaming or not.

We hate grunt work because it is a brass knuckles affair. It is decidedly unhuman work that has no ‘heart’. We approach it with the same gusto as Dumbledore did the Emerald potion. So much so that you can define a human being’s suitable vocation based on the kind of grunt work they can stomach.

There is a duality in most tasks where part of the process is brass knuckles and the other is a love affair. Take writing for example. In a recent interview on writing, J.K Rowling explains that her writing process has two components that she playfully calls the lake and the shed.

Going by this analogy, the shed is the grunt work, and the lake is something within the writer.

Mathematics is the same. You need a big imagination to enjoy mathematics. You have to love the stories behind the numbers, and see the beauty in the theories, otherwise, mathematics is just grunt work.

If you love the field of work where the grunt work comes from, you might be able to stomach it easily. But another way to go about it is to do grunt work in a way that makes you fall in love with the field; especially if it’s something you would like to do as a career or hobby going forward. What I mean by ‘playing in the mud’ is making grunt work fun, or at least bearable. It all starts with a change in your mindset.

Foundations can be all the difference.

No pressure but foundations can determine whether you succeed or fail. Life always gives you a second chance, and a third, and a hundredth. But most things in life progress by building on top of a previous thing in a more or less linear way. Appreciating that doing all the hard work at the beginning will compound into something great down the line can add pressure, but another way to think about it is that you can do something now that will greatly improve your chances of success.

Foundations also means covering the basics. If you want to be great at something, the fundamentals of it have to become second nature, and the only way to make them so is to ‘play in the mud’ until they become so. One way to deal with grunt work that is repetitive is to become so insanely good at the repetitive thing that it stops being work afterall. A great example are cashiers who learn how to count money fast and accurately.

A thoroughly human affair

A huge part of learning to love grunt work is accepting that it is part of the game. Take it as a fact of life, nay, a fact of human life. In a world of technology and AI, grunt work is like a portal to a world of distant past. It can show you just how far we’ve come, and you can appreciate the progress we’ve made even more. At the same time, it will show you how things were done ‘back then’, and you get to experience a weird sort of connection to the people of those times. It is like a homecoming—a return to who you ‘really’ are as a human being.

This is one of the reasons the idea of selling everything and going to live in the woods sounds appealing to some people. That return to a life where you, the human being, were the difference between success and failure. Where you mattered, and felt irreplaceable even if just to your family and community. It is easy to feel like just another cog in the machine in the today’s world.

It makes you worth your salt.

AI will make it really easy for people to fake certain professions and get away with it. The biggest use of AI right now is by students to do their homework and write stuff. That means that those who do things the ‘old-fashioned way’ will be worth more because a lot of people will pay more to avoid all the AI tosh. People will pay to avoid AI writers, and AI artists and AI programmers, etc. So doing the grunt work will make you worth your salt.

Adventures, Innovation and Discoveries

Think of grunt work as an invitation for adventure that could fuel innovation and discovery. I can’t recall the title, but I once read in a book in which a story is told of an anthropologist who discovered an indigenous people who had no word for ‘up’ in their vocabulary. Surprisingly, if you hid something somewhere high and told them to look for it, they would look everywhere but up. That’s how our minds work and it’s why discoveries and innovation take so much time and come out of nowhere. One way to fuel innovation and discoveries is by doing grunt work. In the process of doing that repetitive, boring or menial task, you think up a way to make it easier or better, or you discover something new about your field. You can also make errors that uncover new paths for you.

The Great Teacher

The best way to learn something is to learn by doing because you get immediate feedback and you engage all your senses to learn in a visceral way rather than just using your mind. Grunt work can teach you basic skills that will be useful to you in the long-run. It is especially good at teaching you the things you won’t find in a book, such as the exceptions to all the rules. Simple things like typing, data entry, etc, are actually complex tasks involving different parts of your brain, nervous system and body. Grunt work is like some kind of a work out, except that it is highly specific to your interests. If its something you are going to do repeatedly, it becomes an edge if you can learn to do it faster so that you develop muscle memory and you can free up your mind to do other things because you are so used to it.

Don’t Go To Therapy, Do Grunt Mud Work

Grunt work forces you to slow down and that could benefit other areas of your life. It is good for your mental health because it gives you a better perspective of your normal life outside the grunt work. It can also teach you patience, endurance, and a host of other things which will only grow like muscles.

Personally, I’ve found that I usually only dislike grunt work at the start, but once I get going, I find something in the work to challenge myself with and then it becomes a game. I also enjoy doing small things that can have large rewards, and that is how most grunt work of the ‘laying the foundations’ kind is like. No matter how tedious, the rewards down the line far outweigh the effort. I also find that one way to improve my feelings of wellbeing is to move my body around and be aware of it. Most grunt work can be physical even if it’s just typing and reading. But by being more aware of myself as I go through these motions, I find that I feel grounded.

Finally, the best way to approach grunt work is with a playful attitude and creativity. Be willing to make mistakes, to go down any interesting paths you find along the way, to pay attention to things that are ‘menial’, to be present in the moment, and to take part in this distinctly human affair in a way that only you can. Even if it’s painting a house, or data-entry, you can find a way to express yourself and enjoy yourself in such tasks. Done correctly, it can feel about the same as playing in the mud does to a child.

The reason I call it mud work is because to my ADHD mind, grunt work feels like getting stuck in mud and the only recourse is to give in and play in the mud until you find your way out. My mind is always seeking a fun or fast way to do something, however menial. Sometimes you can be stuck in the mud for years learning a new skill. Don’t despair.