deep clean in series, not in parallel
I came to the finish line of my basement cleanout project yesterday. Only took a year - you got this!
I am in year 2 of reorganizing my garage and it’s now so bad there is only one small walkway from the door to the house entrance.
I need an adult.
As you organize the garage you build the adult.
Profound
Use a week of PTO, and rent a dumpster. Take literally everything out of the garage, and place any obvious trash in the dumpster. Start methodically moving things back in, taking care to ensure each item has a “spot”. Continue sifting through things and throw things away as necessary. Anything small that still works but isn’t needed goes into the sell pile, anything large that could be easily fixed or still desirable goes on the curb for free pickup. You got this!
HA PTO that’s not a real thing
My gendernonspecificusername, you can give me all the tips in the world but if there’s no drive to do something, something is very unlikely to get done.
If this garage didn’t contain 250,000 small items scattered everywhere, and was instead easily identifiable trash and large easily separable items, it would have been done the first week I dedicated to it when I left my last job. Hours and hours a day, every day for slightly more than a week.
If I could keep myself on track and not get super in-depth in specific areas, I’d have the bulk organized and the small stuff contained to a smaller area I could focus on over time.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in Perfect, I get easily side-tracked, and for every hour I spend cleaning, I spend another messing around with the things I find and another 20 minutes figuring out where all the pieces to that abandoned project went.
If I could pay a couple people like $100 to help for a few hours, I could probably put up all my shelving, get the big stuff taken care of, and the shelves vaguely organized into hobbies. Buuuuut I don’t trust strange people I don’t know and I don’t want people I DO know seeing how bad it’s gotten. That last part is a big problem for me.
Why yes, I COULD use a therapist.
Step one: everything out of the garage.
Step two: lunch
Step three: everything has been stolen (taken away, how were they to know you still wanted it?)
Done!
It’s a hard mode game. I need some strategy ready for when the battery suddenly says 1% remaining.
The strategy is called recognizing when the battery is at 10%.
It’s a scientifically established fact that higher levels of exhaustion take a disproportionately greater amount of recovery time.
If you use 10% of your tank you can recover in an hour. But if you use 80% of your tank it might take 48 hours (instead of the linearly-expected 8) to recover.
So the trick is to draw the line earlier. Meditation can be great for developing this kind of awareness. More time spent paying attention to something recruits more neurons into the perception of that thing. More neurons means higher resolution. Higher resolution means seeing things you couldn’t see before.
The body is like a TV show that’s always playing in the background of our lives. If we stop and actually watch that TV for a while, we can get a better sense of the characters and the plot.
Drugs are handy too. Drugs alter physiological state in relatively predictable ways, so with some refined self awareness and a drug that say blocks adrenaline from binding, you can learn to pick out the effect of adrenaline on your consciousness, and differentiate that from cortisol or dopamine or glutamate. You can learn exactly how systemic inflammation feels by experimenting with ibuprofen.
TL;DR take breaks before you need them
Fun fact, cars kinda work that way too. The more full your tank, the better your fuel efficiency.
Don’t ask me to explain why, because I have no idea. I just know I’ve tested it on 5 different vehicles now with years ranging from 89-23, and the results are consistent and significant.
It’s a mind over matter thing. I think I eventually just taught myself to meditate while cleaning so I can just shut my brain off and do it until it’s done.
But, being ADHD it only stays tidy for like a week tops.
@thepianistfroggollum @memes You guys can clean? 😅
It really does help to loosen the attachment while cleaning, just handle one thing at a time without trying to grasp the bigger picture.
My life while dealing with multiple chronic illnesses.
Yeah, I’ve learned to not try to do such deep cleaning. I clean the floor regularly in hopes that removes 80% of the dust. But everything else, I clean as I see that it’s dirty. Well, and without putting it off for too long, otherwise I do need to do a deep clean when someone visits.
I got a robot vacuum/mop so I don’t have to worry about most of the floors, now, just need to remember to change out the water. I would have its little robot babies I love it so much.
This was me trimming some trees in my yard. Turns out cutting off some branches is the easy part. Dealing with branches full of leaves took me an additional 3 hours
I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.
I can relate.
I’m trying to make cleaning a habit instead of a project, and it’s starting to work. So far I have established a little twinge of discomfort when I walk away from a dish I’ve just used.
Did you know that some people just naturally form habits without even trying? I kinda hate those people sometimes lol
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Yeah but bad habits are often formed because they’re things we enjoy on some level. The idea of just like doing something at a set time without 20 different reminders and alarms going off is absolutely baffling to me. Like, my husband will just wake up in the morning and go through his routine IN HIS HEAD without any reminders or lists. He does like 50 things and it’s so effortless for him he just remembers. He even has different things he does for different days of the week and he just remembers them. I deeply envy people built like that because some of us genuinely don’t have the capacity to learn it. I tried for 20 years even mirroring my husband to try and find a similar groove and it never takes. I have to have reminders, reminders about my reminders, and then sometimes an extra one to remind me to get back to it because I tend to end up doing something ridiculous like scrubbing baseboards halfway through doing the dishes 😭
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My strategy these days is to just give myself a break. If it takes two hours for the dishes to be done then it takes two hours. It’s whatever I got it done. I now only use aggressive reminders for important and less frequent things to prevent me from becoming numb to or overwhelmed by alarms. I also do this super dorky thing where I have cleaning roll tables that I use every day. One is for like surfaces, floors, walls etc and one is for rooms etc. There are a few tables but they all cover more niche chores that are easily overlooked and then have little extra things like “find a permanent place for something”. It’s made a shockingly big difference because it’s kinda fun to roll and I end up doing unpleasant things I would normally try to put off if they were on a list lmao. If I roll a nat 20 I get a free lazy day to use whenever I need a break. If I roll a nat 1 I have to roll for a second chore 😅
And yeah, in case it’s not already overwhelmingly obvious, I got a heavy dose of the ADHD you were correct.
This reminds me, I know chores are one thing, but similar stuff comes up in creative work and like…How does anyone convince themselves to complete that stuff?
I’ll jot down an idea, then start a draft or outline, but then can’t be bothered to polish it up and get it to a state to share.
Yeah, it’s so much more fun to plan to do something, take the first big steps, and then get bogged down in the tedious part.
Basically you gotta learn to value your own muse enough to work for your muse, as if it’s your employer.
Like when you work for someone else, it’s nice to have tangible accomplishments but you can also force yourself forward on the basis of “well it’s my job”. That forcing yourself forward, for a part of yourself that isn’t currently conscious (the creative part that felt all that drive when you started), is working for yourself.
Step for step, then you have less to clean per mood.
I have a further question why is the pile of clothes always on my side of the bed and not yours yes I am comfortable on the couch why
Thats why my deep cleaning involves a drawer or two and thats it. Break it down and you can do much cleanning
I’m also a fan of that. Breaking it into small areas, rather than everything all at once.
See, I’m the opposite. 5 min sesh with live rosin and I’m ready to flip a house.
This kind of thing happened to me earlier on while I was drilling a hole in the wall 🤦♂️
Fortunately holes are countable objects so you can’t have half of one.
Me for the last 5 weeks
Very relatable
