Finishing Chores

2024-10-12

I dont know if I can extrapolate this to all parts of my life but one thing I have noticed makes me more efficient, and more happy, is trying to fully complete chores instead of leaving them at 50% or 75% done.

Lets take for example washing, drying, folding, and putting away clothes, and just for this lets say each of these take 25% of the time. During a normal work week I find myself having small breaks through out the day and so I use this time to do these chores, like putting clothes in the washer, or moving them to the dryer. But the last two stages in the pipeline are much more manual and require Sneha’s help (for putting them away) and so I am more reluctant to do them. So often we have clothes that are washed and dried but not folded or not put away. And I have realized that it is better to push for finishing the chore 100% than to put it off, it makes our house cleaner and more tidy, but gives a smaller mental load if a small amount of clothes are fully washed and put away vs a large amount of clothes being washed but not put away.

I think this works for a bunch of different chores, washing dishes, putting away kids toys, cleaning the fridge, paying bills, redoing the garage, fixing the grill, etc. I have a tendency to start chores and leave things in a 50% done state. But I am trying to change that and work on a fewer number of things but push them towards 100% done. Maybe I have the ability to focus on a few chores at a time, lets say 3, but once I have three chores in flight I wont take up any new ones until I finish one of those. It is kind of like the kanban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development) style of things but I do think it has made me finish chores quicker and helped prevent context switching.

That being said I dont think I can apply this to my work in quite the same way. I would love to only focus on three things at a time at work but it doesn’t seem to be feasible if I want to manage a complex team or set of projects. There are way more things to do at work and priorities jump around a lot more. So at work I have to be more detail oriented and take more notes to keep track of all of the things in flight.

-Gary