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Emily 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)
If you cleaned really frequently in small bursts (say, for 20 minutes a day, almost every day?), starting from your "satisfactory" point, would that be enough to maintain the satisfactory point more or less continuously? Then each 20-minute burst of work would come with the "satisfactory state" reward.
Yes, this is what I try to do, and it is what I am able to do for, typically, a couple months at a time. Having someone else remind me that this is better than three hours all at once is good though. For some reason, I find myself slowly ignoring this advice from myself if I don't hear it from somewhere else every now and then. (avoiding this problem might be another good "stupid question"...)
I used to have the same problems, but I solved it with a Beeminder goal of doing 10 minutes of cleaning per day (6 days a week).
Even with very little money on the line ($0 or 5$), I still had enough incentive to actually punch in 10 minutes on the microwave timer and turn into a Tasmanian Cleaning Devil until I heard the ding!!
I feel strangely accomplished afterwards (both for having the discipline to fulfill my commitment on Beeminder and for having an orderly house). I was and still am able to maintain extraordinary levels of cleanliness ever since!
I'm not very good at it either! :)