Pleasure Bundling Examples: Chores, Study, Exercise, Paperwork

The logic of pleasure bundling is easy to understand and hard to fit into your own life. The sentence "pair what you love with a boring task" leaves the questions of which boring task and which thing you love unanswered.

In this article I will try to answer that question in four areas: housework, study and academic work, exercise, and paperwork. Every example has four things: the task, the pleasure, the lock and the point to watch.

Two reminders before starting. I explained what the method is and what the research found in the article on pleasure bundling, and the step-by-step setup and the traps in the article on how to set up a pleasure bundle. Second, all the experiments I could find are about exercise and were done with the general population. The non-exercise examples below are pairings I find worth trying; they should not be read as researched prescriptions.

Why examples matter so much

In ADHD the value of a distant reward drops faster. A meta-analysis combining 21 independent studies shows that people with ADHD devalue a delayed monetary reward faster than control groups, with a medium-sized difference (Jackson and MacKillop, 2016). The reward of a clean kitchen or a paid bill is exactly of this kind: delayed and abstract.

A pleasure bundle moves the reward into the task. For this to work, the pairing has to be concrete. A bundle that starts with "I'll listen to something" usually falls apart the first evening. A bundle that starts with "I'll listen to the new episode of this detective series only while doing the dishes" has a better chance of holding.

Housework

I explained why housework is so hard in ADHD and the general approaches in the article on housework. There I had briefly mentioned attaching the reward to the task. Here I open that up.

Dishes.

• Pleasure: The new episode of a podcast you follow.
• Lock: That podcast is opened only in the kitchen. The phone is on the counter, screen off.
• Watch for: When the dishes are done, the episode is shut off even if it is left half way. The half-finished episode becomes the reason for tomorrow's dishes.

Folding laundry and ironing.

• Pleasure: A series. In these tasks the hands are busy but the eyes can drift to the screen now and then.
• Lock: That series is opened only beside the basket.
• Watch for: Moving the folding in front of the series is easy, but when ironing, the eyes must not go completely to the screen. Carelessness and a hot iron do not make a good pair.

Preparing meals. I do the cooking at home. The hands-on parts, like chopping vegetables, kneading dough, and clearing the dishes now and then, feel very suited to an audiobook.

• Pleasure: A gripping audiobook.
• Lock: The book moves forward only in the kitchen.
• Watch for: Stop the book when you need to look at the recipe or measure something. Reading a recipe needs the language channel.

Weekly cleaning or tidying cupboards.

• Pleasure: A playlist that opens only on cleaning day. High energy, it can have lyrics.
• Lock: The playlist is not played at any other time.
• End: When the playlist ends, the cleaning ends. This adds a finish line to a task that never finishes.

Study and academic work

Here the bundle needs the most care, because most of studying uses the language channel. A verbal piece of content reaching the ear while you read or write shares the same resource. That is why in academic work the work has to be split in two.

The automatic parts. Formatting references, arranging tables, data entry, naming files, checking footnotes. These are also the parts I put off most in my academic work.

• Pleasure: A podcast, or an album with lyrics that you love.
• Lock: That album plays only during "housekeeping tasks."
• Watch for: When you reach a place in the work where you need to think, turn the sound off. Finding a gap in the references may require reading in order to fill it.

Reading and writing. Here, instead of choosing the pleasure from sound, I choose from other channels.

• Pleasure: A tea or coffee drunk only while working, a cafe you like, a window seat, a wordless study playlist.
• Lock: You go to that cafe only to read. That tea is brewed only at the desk.
• Watch for: The strength of the pleasure stays low here, because there is no curiosity coming from the sound. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Review and memorization. Card study, vocabulary repetition.

• Pleasure: Walking. Walking with the cards in your hand or on your phone turns the movement into the pleasure.
• Watch for: Looking at a screen while walking on a crowded street is not safe. Try it in a park or an empty corridor.

Exercise and movement

All the experiments I could find are in this area. In the first experiment, participants who could reach audio novels only at the gym went to the gym 51 percent more at the start. The effect faded over time and largely disappeared after a holiday break (Milkman et al., 2014). In a larger trial with 6,792 people, the weekly number of workouts rose by 10-12 percent in the group given an audiobook and advised on the method (Kirgios et al., 2020). Both studies were done with the general population.

Walking.

• Pleasure: An audiobook. In the experiment participants had chosen gripping novels. Genres that make you say "one more chapter," like detective stories or thrillers, are worth trying.
• Lock: The book moves forward only while walking. You do not sit at home and listen.
• Watch for: Outdoors, keep the volume low enough that you can hear your surroundings, or use one earphone. When crossing the street, attention must stay on traffic.

Treadmill or stationary bike.

• Pleasure: A series. Because the eyes are free, the screen is not a problem here.
• Lock: That season of the series is watched only on the machine.
• Watch for: When the season ends, the bundle collapses. Choose the next series now.

Stretching and light exercise.

• Pleasure: A short podcast episode.
• End: When the episode ends, the stretching ends. It provides a natural duration between five and twenty minutes.

Paperwork, email and bureaucracy

I explained why paperwork is the task that piles up most, and the system I built for it, in the article on paperwork and bureaucracy. A pleasure bundle adds an ease of starting to that system.

Paying bills, filing documents.

• Pleasure: A cafe you like and a dessert or drink there.
• Lock: You do not go to that cafe without the paperwork folder.
• Watch for: The cafe should be a place whose noise will not bother you. In the parts where you enter numbers and identity details, attention must stay entirely on the task.

Archiving email and clearing the inbox.

• Pleasure: An album you set aside only for this task.
• End: When the album ends, the task ends. The remaining emails are left for the next album.

Waiting in a phone queue. Listening to hold music for minutes to reach an institution can be one of the moments when tolerance of discomfort is most strained.

• Pleasure: A paper puzzle or coloring.
• Watch for: Opening a game on the phone itself looks easy, but when the wait is over, it can be hard to leave the game. A screenless pleasure that keeps your hands busy is safer.

Filling in forms.

• Pleasure: In this task, pleasure coming from sound often interferes. Wordless music and a drink you like are enough.
• Watch for: Leave the part of the form that needs attention for the moment when the pleasure is at its lowest.

At work

When building a digital strategy, the most enjoyable part of the work is thinking. The most postponed part is the drudgery around thinking: cleaning data, formatting reports, naming presentation files, issuing invoices.

Data cleaning and report formatting.

• Pleasure: An album you love or a podcast series that plays only during these tasks.
• Lock: That album sits in a separate list on the work computer and is not opened at any other time.
• Watch for: When you reach the commentary part of the report, that is, when language and thinking enter the work, turn the sound off or switch to wordless music.

Writing up meeting notes.

• Pleasure: A drink you like, taken only while writing up the notes, and a comfortable corner.
• Watch for: Because writing up notes asks for language, the pleasure should not come from sound.

Pairings to avoid

Some pleasures, when put in a bundle, produce a problem of their own instead of supporting the task.

• Screens while driving. No bundle is worth it.
• Food and dessert. Pairing a snack with every boring task can turn food into a source of stimulation. A single dessert at the cafe is not the same thing as a packet of biscuits with every dish.
• Alcohol. Pairing a boring task with alcohol means tying alcohol to a regular habit.
• Browsing a shopping site. It starts as a pleasure and turns into spending.
• Short-video feeds and autoplaying recommendations. Because they have no end, they destroy the end of the bundle.
• Games that make you spend money or work on a loot-box logic. An unpredictable reward pulls much more strongly than the task itself.

What these pleasures have in common is that they are wanted even without the task and they easily cross the line. I dealt with the need for stimulation itself and with directing it into safer channels in the article on stimulation seeking.

Finding your own pairing

A review examining studies with children with ADHD reports that immediate and intensive reinforcement particularly supports task performance (Luman et al., 2005). Although it has not been tested directly in adults, it makes me think of choosing the pleasure generously and in a form that starts in the first minute of the task.

Two lists. Divide a sheet of paper in two. On the left side write the five tasks you put off most. On the right side write five pleasures that you consume with guilt or would like to spend more time on. Then connect them with lines: a task done by hand with a pleasure that comes through sound, a task that asks for language with a place or a drink. Pick a single pairing and try only that this week.

The list on the right looks like what the glossary calls a dopamine menu. The difference is this: the pleasures on the menu are for the moment you are bored, the pleasures in the bundle are inside the task you put off. It is also possible for the two to be fed from the same list. In the site's glossary the method itself appears under reward pairing.

Do not try to set up all of these examples at once. Pick one, try it for two weeks, then move on to the second. The best thing about pleasure bundling is that it makes a task doable without waiting to like it. I still do not like the dishes. It is just that now something I am curious about sits next to them.