Menial tasks are repetitive tasks that require little thought to do properly. Think about chopping vegetables, sweeping the floor, walking to the grocery store, washing the dishes, or anything like that. There are so many products and services nowadays that seek to eliminate these tasks in the name of convenience. For example, there are food processors for chopping vegetables, robotic vacuum cleaners for sweeping the floor, delivery apps for restaurant and grocery delivery, and dishwashers for washing the dishes.
The main benefit of convenience is that you can spend your time on more valuable, non-menial tasks. I think this makes a lot of sense, but I do think that menial tasks do serve an important purpose. They give you the time to process what happened during the day. Although time spent on menial tasks isn’t seen as productive since it doesn’t produce any results, it is absolutely necessary to future productivity in much the same way that sleep is necessary for future athletic performance. Think of productive work as exercise and processing time as recovery. Without proper recovery, you can’t perform as well the next day; similarly, without proper mental processing, you can’t be as productive tomorrow.
For exercise and work, it is easy to believe that more is better. That’s true in the short run, but in the long run, it’s better to have a balance of exercise/work and recovery/processing. In particular, giving yourself adequate mental processing time will help you make better decisions, which is very, very important for longer time horizons.
If I don’t give myself enough mental processing time, I usually feel a loss of clarity the next day and a bit more anxiety. Over time, the anxiety and confusion builds until I’m no longer able to do any productive work.
Menial tasks are conducive to mental processing because of their repetitive and simple nature. They engage the body but leave the mind free to wander and sift through the events of the day. People often have their “Eureka” moments in the shower or on a walk, which is not surprising, given that showering and walking are two menial tasks that many people engage in on a daily basis.
Mental processing can occur without menial tasks, but menial tasks are the best way to reliably induce mental processing. I’m still trying to find the best way to incorporate these sorts of tasks into my day, especially after I’m done working for the day. Obviously, too many chores will stress anyone out, but having optional chores or menial activities that are ready to go at any time may work well.
Lastly, a note on smartphones: The mental health crisis and increased diagnoses of ADD/ADHD blamed on smartphones/social media may not have as much to do with the actual content being viewed as many people think. The more time you spend looking at your phone, the less time you have for mental processing. It’s possible that a deficit in mental processing time is one of the main causes of the increase of smartphone-related depression/ADD/ADHD cases. To test this hypothesis, you could take a group of teenagers who report high daily screen times and give each person in the test group a set of menial tasks to complete everyday. At the end of three months, if the test group’s mental health profiles are statistically significantly better than the control group’s, what I said may be true.
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