I came to a sad realization the other day, that my bad time management was in part caused by bad chore management. What I mean by that is that I always felt like I had too many responsibilities to take care of, like cleaning, working, fixing stuff and learning before having fun creating.
Even though I have tons of project ideas, I also have tons of chore ideas. There is always something to clean, to fix or to set up, there is no end to it. And as a “responsible” human, I want to take care of those chores, but the problem is that I’m never finished with them, because it never ends.
It doesn’t matter whether I make the dishes everyday or once a week, I will have dirty dishes to clean sooner or later anyway. I’m not the best at cleaning, and I probably don’t do it as much as I should either, but there is always something to clean in some way, dishes, clothes, sink, toilet, bath, desk, etc. The trash, recycling and compost bins are always full, there is always expired food lying in the fridge, etc.
Also, as someone who loves to learn new things, I always have something new to read about and as soon as I finish learning on a new subject, there’s already another one that I want to learn about. So much that I don’t even put what I learn into practice but mostly learn just for the sake of it.
And when I’m tired of doing chores and reading/learning, I’m also too tired to start creating so I play video games or watch anime instead. So in the end, I’m just cleaning, reading and learning stuff but rarely doing any creative work.
Most of the time, even if I know that I won’t be doing any chores for the rest of the day, I still can’t allow myself to create much, because in my head, I still know that I have some “work” left to do… and just end up wasting my time watching Youtube videos instead… trying to push away the moment when I need to do chores again.
So, just like I have to limit how much videos games I play and how much anime I watch, I decided to limit how much, or for how long, that I will work on chores and other similar tasks, and do creative stuff with the remaining time.
For example, on a weekend day (or any day that I’m off from the job), I split the day in three parts, the morning, the afternoon, and the evening. I decided to do “productive work” in the morning, so that I can get it out of the way in first. During that time I try to complete most of the tasks and chores like cleaning, reading, shopping, coding, etc. The other reason for doing it in the morning is that I can then have the satisfaction of being productive so the switch to the fun stuff is easier.
Then, in the afternoon, I start doing creative work, playing music, drawing, writing, etc. Those who have read my past articles will probably know about my attention deficit and the fact that I generally alternate between two or three tasks at one. But in this particular case, I decided to try doing a single creative activity for at least one or two hours straight, and up to now, it has been working well for me. The reason why I decided to not apply my own multi-task principle is to allow myself to really dig deeper in my creativity without interruption. And I must say that it really helped me focusing and forgetting about everything else, which I didn’t even believe that it was possible for me anymore.
The evening is left opened for random activities, so it really ends up being a mix of reading stuff, playing games and watching videos. I think that if I managed to do what I had to do in the two previous parts, then I can take it easy in the evening and just be unstructured, because my day has not been wasted.
So if you struggle with allowing yourself to create over doing chores and other tasks, try this and see if it works for you.