A little revelation dawned today: a part of a large job that I thought was the easiest part is actually the largest PITA and the hardest part of the job. Is it possible that when we think of a job that consists of a series of tasks, we may over- or underestimate the amount of energy or time required for any given one of those tasks?
As you may recall, if you’re doggèd enough to read this blog all the time, a week or so ago I decided to follow my friend KJG’s advice to divide the misery that is housecleaning into one task a day. This scheme has many things to recommend it, not the least of which is that one can maintain one’s shack without the weekly housecleaning frenzy that reduces one to a blob of exhausted jelly.
The plan has been chugging right along this week: Monday, vacuum & dust-mop 1860 square feet of tile floors; Tuesday, steam-mop floors; today, dust and do pool maintenance…
Okay. Vacuuming and dustmopping were pretty easy. Steam-mopping the whole house: piece of cake. Dusting…ho-o-o-llleeee mackerel!
Maybe it’s because I haven’t done a halfway decent job of cleaning in more months than I’ve been alive. Or maybe it’s because I hate it, because here in lovely uptown Arizona you can dust the furniture on a Wednesday and write your name on the coffee table on Thursday. Something there is about futility that doesn’t lend itself to enthusiasm. Or…maybe it’s that dusting seven rooms of furniture, blinds, ceiling fans, bookcases, framed pictures, framed mirrors, door frames, molding, curtain rods, and miscellaneous doo-dads is, objectively, a MUCH larger job than merely pushing a machine or a dustmop across a couple thousand square feet of flooring.
Thot i wuz gunna DIE by the time i finished!
Part of the problem is, I’ve neglected this job for way, way too long. “Dusting” has entailed a kiss-and-run swat with a microfiber rag for lo! these many months. With the day focused on just one job, one is led to think…
• Gosh, those beloved Thos. Moser chairs are looking downright dessicated.
• Is there anything I can do about those gouges in the top of the family room desk?
• When did this chair in the bedroom develop a crack in its underpinnings?
• Dang, but my office desk is filthy! Can’t I scrub up all that body oil and grime from around the keyboard and rodent?
• How is it possible for so much dust to have accrued on the lampshades?
• Why does the rodent, in the absence of a mouse pad, deposit a galaxy of gummy little black spots all over the desktop?
• Maybe one ought not to pile a modem, a router, a gadget with a jillion USB ports, a defunct cell phone, a camera case, and a spaghetti pile of cables into one box thingie at the back of the desk.
• Why has it taken two microfiber rags to dust the bedrooms and now already I need another clean one?
• I’m going to have to sit down with a dry paintbrush to get the dust off all these accursed fake flowers and foliage.
And so on.
But neglect aside, I suspect that what seems like a small part of the project really has always been much larger than I perceived.
Consider: in the first place, you can’t pick up the office so as to find surfaces to dust without tending to the vast piles of paper that flow in through the mail. So the day started out with bookkeeping and filing tasks that I never welcome. Took an hour to move the junk off the desk, and there wasn’t even that much junk!
Or there was: Entered data from three months’ worth of brokerage and IRA statements. One could say I got behind…considerably behind.
Same is true with the rest of the rooms: stuff has got to be picked up and put away or thrown out before you can get to the stage where you can clean the dust off things.
Often, too, one repair or another has to be made, and these tasks may expand into more tasks. Today, for example, I happened to remember my mother’s folk remedy for scratched table tops: walnuts. This required me to defrost a walnut, since said provisions reside in the freezer.
Massaged a great deal of walnut meat and oil into the maze of scratches ripped into a rather beautiful desk top by whatever mystery material had attached itself to my laptop one day. A stone, presumably. Whatever, it made one heckuva a mess.
As a matter of fact, the walnut trick worked pretty well. Of course, it didn’t fill in the deep scratches that whatever-it-was inflicted. But it disguised them nicely, blending well into the cherry finish. Now I had a schmear of walnut oil in the middle of the tabletop.
Drag out the English Oil and some old rags. Apply said oil to the table; polish polish polish polish polish polish… DAMN but that looks good!!!!!!
And now that the family-room desk looks freaking gorgeous, everything else in the room, including two extravagantly expensive cherry and ash chairs, looks pretty tired.
Proceed to oil the chairs, the media cabinet, the dining room table, the dining room chairs, the three nesting tables, the Stickley table in the living room, the Indian table my father liberated from the docks in Ras Tanura, the weird Mexican folding desk, the annoying Ethan Allen coffee table whose excessively shiny surface the greyhound scratched within an hour after its delivery, and a fair amount of floor tiling onto which I slopped English oil. Scrub English oil off the tilework.
At this point, work has begun to expand to fill all available space…
By the time I finish, I’ve dragged pieces of furniture around and dragged them back into place, climbed up to the ceiling fans (balancing on the bed and chairs to reach them), crawled around on the floor, dragged basket after basket of trash out to the recycling bin, repaired a cabinet door latch, done battle with the Venetian blinds, cleaned the top of the refrigerator, scrubbed fingerprints off the woodwork, and on and on…
It may be that this is characteristic of jobs in the workplace as well as in our personal lives: that we think of some routine tasks as being smaller or taking less time than they really do. If that’s the case, it becomes a time management issue for each of us, and for managers or administrators, it becomes a personnel issue.
If we don’t have a good grip on how much effort or time a given activity takes, then we’re at risk of overwork, missed deadlines, or job burnout — and we may not even know why. With the teaching, for example, the amount of time consumed by course preparation and setting up websites is phenomenal (especially if you use Blackboard) — and since for adjuncts it’s unpaid time, keeping that task under control is useful. Similarly, when I was running the Great Desert University’s scholarly journals office, my dean undoubtedly was not aware of how much of my time was being wasted by riding herd on my eccentric secretary. As a result, she (the dean) allowed the situation to simmer along until I let it be known, by deliberately launching a message to a part of the grapevine that I knew would quickly get back to her, that if said secretary wasn’t gone by a certain date, I was going to quit. Had she been more aware, as a manager, of how her underlings’ time was breaking down, things never would have gone that far.
The take-away message? Maybe it’s a good idea to review tasks occasionally to identify those that are the most time-consuming, if for no other reason than to budget adequate time to complete them — but ideally, to consider ways to do them more efficiently.
I am a terrible housekeeper, so take w/ grain of salt. BUT–why not box up, give to son, or simply store some of the knickknacks that are causing misery?
Also–why are you entering info from each statement? I just glance and throw into a box. At the end of the year, I keep only the last ones. My son has all online info and ALL HIS STATEMENTS ARE ONLINE and not by his doing.
I have 6 rooms for two. Seven is a lot for one person! A lot to clean especially.
I don’t have a lot of knick-knacks. Collecting tschochkies has never interested me, oddly enough. But lamps, computer equipment, telephone extensions, picture frames, mirror frames, bookshelves, tables, chairs, bedframes, and the like need to be dusted.
And wood furniture needs to be oiled, especially here where the air is so dry.
Why do I enter info from each statement: Why indeed? Probably OCD. I have a spreadsheet set up that will total the bottom lines of all IRA and brokerage accounts and then calculate net payout from a 3%, 4%, and 5% drawdown of total investments. It’s interesting and it gives an idea of how much I would have if I had to rely solely on investments and Social Security. That way when the time comes that I no longer can earn even a pittance, there won’t be any nasty surprises. I hope…
LOL! Yes, seven rooms are too many. This house has four bedrooms. One is used for storage, so it doesn’t see a lot of heavy-duty cleaning activity. The other is a TV room that I can also use for crafts, but since I hardly ever watch TV, it doesn’t get much use, either. Two bedrooms would be idea, but two-bedroom houses in habitable zones are few and far between, except in Sun City, a ghetto for the elderly where I prefer not to live.
Because of the house’s location — in a buffer zone between an area of $700,000 homes and an increasingly blighted apartment slum — when I found this area I stumbled into the only centrally located middle-class neighborhood with well built, relatively new homes that is affordable. Smaller houses and patio homes in areas where I would feel safe are a) significantly more expensive and b) usually a LONG way from my haunts. I truly do dislike apartment living, and even if I didn’t, apartments and condos in the central city are either in blighted areas or out of the question in terms of cost.
Reviewing tasks? I agree. THings always take a different amoutn of time than I think! For the dusting thing, I don’t know much about it, but now that you’ve started, won’t it be easier next week when you do it again? Especially since you haven’t dusted for a century? I don’t clean, I hate it. But in return I do all the yardwork and fix stuff that gets broke, kinda works out like that.
I think I would do ANYTHING not to have seven rooms to clean. I live in a two bedroom/two bath with my spouse and honestly, if I was forced I could pare it down to one bedroom one bath. And I do live in a old person/ghetto but a ghetto is what you make of it. These are wonderful houses in a beautiful setting with amenities.
There are a lot of people here older than us and less active, but in my whole life I have yet to live in the “perfect” neighborhood and this has freed up a ton of money for travel.
But to each her own. You need to live in whatever makes you happy.
However, the whole dusting things is beyond me. I can’t bring myself to do it very often for all the reasons you state. It is so futile. So now I do it before company comes which isn’t that often.
Oh my, did I say that out loud?
Your post reminded me of a show I saw on TV quite a while a go – move/twilight zone episode/other? Don’t remember – but the main character accidently/on purpose killed someone in their frontroom in a fit of rage. After he realized what he had done he carefully wiped down everything in the front room he had touched, then the door, and then he wasn’t sure if he had touched anything in the hall so he wiped it down, then he wiped down the kitchen….they caught him because hours later he was found in the attic wiping down everything stored there “just in case” he might have touched something on that day he killed the man… Cleaning can get out of hand! LOL!