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!
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
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.
It really does help to loosen the attachment while cleaning, just handle one thing at a time without trying to grasp the bigger picture.
deep clean in series, not in parallel
I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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
Step for step, then you have less to clean per mood.
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
