I like cleaning like that! It's easy enough to do every day. Accumulation of marginal gains.
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Stochastic cleaning only works if your attention is uniformly distributed. Mine is definitely not. I just wind up doing the dishes every day, a little vacuuming sometimes, and days later I realize the cat box is overflowing.
To be fair im not entirely random. The stuff that jumps out at me is usually the stuff I'm most embarrassed about. I dont want anyone seeing a dirty toilet or the soda can castle I've been building.
This has been my method. I do one hour of grad school, then 10 minutes of chores all day rotating.
It’s okay. Just do the small thing that’s in front of you.
The key is to keep connecting the noticing of a task, no matter how small, to the execution of the task. You see a spot of spaghetti sauce on the fridge? Clean it.
There’s a reason you didn’t see it for the previous twelve hours but you’re seeing it now: your subconscious is signaling that it’s the right thing to focus on.
“But it’s too small to matter. I need to do the important things”
Oh? How’s that working out for you?
Trust me. Just respect the small things enough to do them right when you notice them, and trust your ADHD ping pong strategy that while it might look inefficient from the outside, it is efficient when everything including willpower resources are taken into account.
We struggle so much with trying to adapt our own patterns to some idea of how we should act. But sometimes the optimal solution is so complex we can’t conceive of it.
Our entire mind has more processing power though. And when you suddenly notice a little problem that you didn’t notice before that moment, it’s because the parts of your mind outside the narrow scope of your consciousness have identified that thing as the next thing to solve.
Why do you have to personally attack me like that? But they forgot all the planning I did before realizing I can't possibly do all that and then settling for doing maybe ten percent.
In my experience using a Roomba represents a cache-22 that renders it useless.
- It is very loud and annoying, and takes a longer time to vacuum than a normal vacuum because of its random “bounce around” approach to cleaning. Therefore, I do not want to be home when it runs.
- Roomba gets stuck on lots of random things - rumpled carpet, a stray sock, a door jamb. Therefore, I need to be home when it runs to fix it.
Due to this contradiction, I sold my Roomba and will never buy another one.
My version of ADHD cleaning was purchasing roombas to cover for my lack of cleaning virtue. Of course they need help all the time, and get stuck if you don’t pre-clear stuff (have a dog who likes to entropically distribute her bones and toys) so the joke is on me, I guess.
entropically
TIL a new great word, thank you.
FAR too accurate.