Adulting is Hard part 1: Laundry and Dishes

Ex-Gifted

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Music

Kawai Kitsune by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4990-kawai-kitsune

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Adulting is hard:

* As a kid your only jobs are good grades and interact with humans

* Even for chores, you’re given plenty of external motivation

* But as an adult all we have is natural consequences and that motivation is pretty spotty

* So it feels really hard to do adult things like maintaining a minimum baseline cleanliness of your home

* A lot of that difficulty is in our heads. The actual work required in real life isn’t excessive once you have reasonable expectations.

* Time yourself to see how much time your regular tasks really take. Show yourself how doable it can be.

* The most important things to keep up with regularly are dishes and laundry

* As long as you have a method, keeping up with these tasks can be totally manageable

If your washing machine can delay start:

1. Set a timer
2. Process dishes: load or unload the dishes, whatever you have to do

• until you reach the end or you have about 3 minutes left on the timer
• if there are dishes left, that’s okay because you’ll get to them tomorrow

1. Go to the laundry and load the washing machine, but delay start until the next day

• The next day when you come to the laundry room, your laundry will be freshly washed
• Move them to the dryer and reload, again delaying until the next day
• Put your dry clothes into a basket and here’s a secret: Folding or hanging is optional.
• This means you only have to remember laundry once per day, not two or three times.

If your washing machine doesn’t have a delay start:

1. Start with your laundry doing a quick wash.
2. Set a timer for however long your quick wash takes and wash your dishes first.
3. Keep yourself occupied on cleaning tasks until the timer goes off
4. Move your clothes straight from the washing machine to the dryer.

• This way the idea is that you never really switch out of that cleaning mindset. You're staying in that cleaning zone the entire time until the clothes get into the dryer and that can help by avoiding the transitions of going from cleaning to not cleaning and then trying to remember to go back to cleaning. That's where we get hung up.

Putting away: when you take your stuff out of the dryer, put into a basket and consider that maybe that’s “away” enough. It’s an intentional laundry pile. Let go of the shame but keep the pile.

Sorting: If you keep a...