#oneaday Day 790: Mess

I honestly don’t understand how mess builds up. It’s a pain in the arse. Because when it builds up, you then have to clean it up. And that, as we all know, is a task which most people would carve neat slices off their own elbow to not have to undertake.

Take our living room. Both of us regularly make an effort to clean it up, tidy up, hoover, put stuff away, but somehow it still gets back into the state it’s in at the time of writing: various bits of crap scattered around the place; a coffee table with a variety of discarded (and empty) crisp and ice lolly wrappers in attendance; coffee cups in every nook and cranny it’s possible to secrete a cup — a likely familiar story for many of you.

It’s often born of good intentions, ironically. You put something down on, say, the coffee table, telling yourself (or possibly someone else who is also present) that you’ll “clean that up in a minute”, that you’ll “do it when Pointless has finished” or that you’re “just finishing this cup of coffee”. Inevitably you then get immersed in Pointless/your cup of coffee/watching the small insect that is crawling around on the wall in the corner of the room and you forget to do it. The process then repeats itself, leading to a buildup of crap.

Staying tidy, then, is a matter of actually following through on these good intentions rather than simply postponing the implementation until an indefinite period “later”. It’s a matter of finishing a bag of Quavers and then putting it straight in the bin; of washing up a coffee cup as soon as it’s been used; of re-using coffee cups rather than getting new ones every time.

But it’s hard. Cleaning up is boring. Washing up is a dirty, smelly task. Doing laundry means you have to hang up all the wet crap before you can put another load on, and preferably before it’s sat stagnating in the washing machine for a week going all whiffy. None of these are appealing tasks at the best of times, and throw in the negative mental attitude which being surrounded by squalor fills you with and it’s, as you might expect, very difficult to get started.

One thing that I’ve tried in the past is to plan out and schedule my day to include set times for tidying up and whatnot. Having worked as a teacher in the past, working to a “timetable” worked quite well for me, and if you’re just doing it for yourself in your own house then there’s no running to the opposite end of the school to find that Year 7 class you found out five minutes ago that you’re supposed to be teaching a cover lesson for.

This is actually quite a good productivity approach all round. And not just for housework, either; if you have any personal projects on the go, whether they’re technical, creative, DIY or fitness-related, it’s dead easy to let them slip and simply not do them. Scheduling your day to include specific (but slightly flexible) time blocks where you’re supposed to do [x] is a good approach for those whose mind and/or attention span isn’t too chaotic to cope with it. The downside to it is, of course, that everything you do has the possibility of starting to feel a bit like work. The way round this is to ensure that you don’t schedule absolutely everything, just the things that you really want or need to do. Do those things when you say you will, and the rest of the time is free to spend as you please. Do those things early, and those scheduled slots magically become free time. And as any teacher worth their salt will tell you, one of the best feelings in the world is discovering you’ve got a free period when you thought you’d have to deal with 9VN.