We often have more choice than you might think. Here's an example - today my boss wanted me to write up a C header file - essentially I had to take an interface supplied to us by a partner, and modify it so that it respected our coding standards. Now, I could have spent 4 hours of hand-editting this (rather large) file, or, I could spend 4 hours writing a custom pretty_print in Ruby to do it for me. One way of doing it is very boring, the other is rather interesting.

More generally, boring = automatable. If the code that you are writing, or the other task you are doing is boring, it is ripe for automating - so automate it! You'll never have to do the boring task again.