The job in your head

There are two versions of every chore. One is in the sink. The other is in your head, and the one in your head is the one you've been refusing to do.

In your head, "clean the kitchen" is a grey block of effort with no clear edges. It feels like an hour, maybe the whole evening. So of course you don't start it at seven on a Wednesday.

I'd like you to run a small test, and it's the most important exercise in the book. Pick a chore you've been putting off. Before you start, write down how long you think it will take. Then set a timer on your phone, do the job at a normal pace, and look at the number.

I can't know your result, but I'll make a bet. Your guess was too high, and it may have been double. A sink of ordinary dishes for one or two people tends to land somewhere around four or five minutes, which is where this book got its title. Hanging a load of washing is in the same range. Making the bed takes about as long as reading this paragraph. Your numbers will be your own, and that's the reason to measure them.

If I lose the bet and the job took longer than you guessed, the test has still done its work. You now have a number. A job that takes eleven minutes has a start and an end, which the grey block never had, and you can decide where eleven minutes fits in your evening. Write your numbers down somewhere, because we'll use them in chapter 7.

So why does the version in your head get so big? I think it's because every postponement adds something to it. Each time you pass the sink, flinch and walk on, a little guilt gets attached to the job. After a week you aren't facing a sink of dishes. You're facing a sink of dishes, plus seven days of guilt, plus the small humiliation of having avoided something so minor. The dishes weigh what they always weighed. The rest of the load is what you've been dreading, and it disappears the moment the job is done.

I should be honest that some of the growth is physical too. Porridge that rinses off in five seconds at breakfast needs scrubbing by evening. Washing left damp in the machine needs washing again. And mess invites mess. A clear sink tends to stay clear, while a single bowl in it acts as permission for every other bowl in the house. So delay raises the real price as well as the imagined one. Whatever the job costs right now, that's the cheapest it will ever be.

Some jobs really are big, of course. The oven. The garage. The box of unopened post. That's true, and timing them won't shrink them to four minutes. Big jobs need a different approach, which is to put a limit on the session instead of on the job, and chapter 9 covers it. But notice where your daily discomfort comes from. It's rarely the garage. It's the small jobs that come round every day, and those are the ones your head inflates the most.