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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Stupid Questions February 2015 - Less Wrong
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I have this issue with motivation. I need to clean my house, but I have a difficult time getting myself to do it, unless I think I can finish it all at once. For example, based on past experience, it takes me around three hours of focused effort to get things from where they are now to satisfactory, but I only have ninety minutes. While I could get half-way there now, and finish up sometime later in the week, I imagine myself working hard for 90 minutes, and still having a messy house. Then I do something else instead, unless I'm in a state where cleaning seems less unpleasant than usual.
Does anybody have advice for combating this problem?
(edited for a typo)
Presumably there is some reason you want a cleaner house, e.g. it will be easier to find stuff. If you spend 90 minutes cleaning, that will get you half as much gain in terms of making it easier to find stuff. So it's still worth doing in its own right. (Similarly, every marginal minute of exercise buys you 3-7 marginal minutes of life (within reason). Etc. This doesn't work for everything but it works for some things.)
Make a plan that you can do in 90 minutes, where the outcome will be better than the starting position.
Next time, make another 90-minute plan.
Maybe this will be less effective in total, e.g. you might need three or four 90-minute sessions to accomplish what you could do in a single 180-minute session. But if the 180-minute session is unavailable, this is the best option you have.
For example: Instead of vacuuming the whole house, do one room at a time. Instead of putting all things to their places, on day 1 collect all things and put them into a temporary basket, and on day 2 take a few random things from the basket and put them where they belong.
Ah, okay, this helps a lot.
The issue is that, normally, there is a sharp transition from "enough clutter to feel messy and be hard to find things" to "clean enough that I can find things and it doesn't feel cluttered". This transition is in the last 30 minutes or so of the 3 hours. This means that:
will help solve the first half of the problem (feeling cluttered), even though it won't help as much with the second half (finding things). The trick will be to actually go back and unpack the temporary clutter storage space. I expect this won't be too hard, since I will be reminded every time I need something that is inside of it.