Do Annoying Work Early, Before It Turns Into a Motivation Undermining Monster
When you see a few plates in the sink, you don’t worry about it, because it’s not critical. You can get it later. When you come back in a couple of days, the sink is full. Now you are wasting energy on the main task. Next time, kill the beast while it is still a baby.
As personal finance site How Do I Money explains, it’s easy to overlook mundane tasks like washing dishes or checking your finances when the problems are minor. While it takes very little effort to wash a couple of dishes, the fact that it is an easy task means you can put it off. Only you’re not going to. At least until it gets bad. At this point, it is no longer an easy task. It’s a grueling monster, ready to steal your motivation for not only washing dishes, but everything you need to do:
With just ten items to wash, it’s quick and easy. When both sides of the sink and half of the counter are filled with dirty dishes, it sucks and takes forever. The more dirty dishes, the less motivation I have to wash them. This is the worst feedback of all. “The relationship between two variables is an inverse relationship, if increasing one increases the other decreases.”
Of course, it is obvious that filling the sink with dishes is more difficult than washing a few, but we still allow them to accumulate. A more insidious consequence is that if we allow simple routines to accumulate, it can demotivate us to do something. Even if you have the motivation to finally clean up the kitchen after putting it off all week, you’ve used up all your motivation to do something else that day .
Instead, the next time you look at a minor task that can be completed in a couple of minutes, don’t look at it as a simple task. Treat it like it’s an investment in your future motivation. Mark an easy task while it seems easy so you can relieve yourself of the stress of a large project later. You can then use that motivation to do something bigger later.
Washing dishes by hand is the most important lesson in life. | How to make money with Rockstar Finance