I have this issue with motivation. I need to clean my house, but I have a difficult time getting myself to do it, unless I think I can finish it all at once. For example, based on past experience, it takes me around three hours of focused effort to get things from where they are now to satisfactory, but I only have ninety minutes. While I could get half-way there now, and finish up sometime later in the week, I imagine myself working hard for 90 minutes, and still having a messy house. Then I do something else instead, unless I’m in a state where cleaning seems less unpleasant than usual.
Does anybody have advice for combating this problem?
Don’t tell yourself that you’re half-cleaning the house. Tell yourself that you’re fully cleaning those rooms(which happen to be half the house). That way, you’re actually completing something.
Yes. Reward your self mentally for cleaning part of the house, instead of punishing yourself mentally for not cleaning it all. Then you will feel motivated to do it next time again.
If you cleaned really frequently in small bursts (say, for 20 minutes a day, almost every day?), starting from your “satisfactory” point, would that be enough to maintain the satisfactory point more or less continuously? Then each 20-minute burst of work would come with the “satisfactory state” reward.
Yes, this is what I try to do, and it is what I am able to do for, typically, a couple months at a time. Having someone else remind me that this is better than three hours all at once is good though. For some reason, I find myself slowly ignoring this advice from myself if I don’t hear it from somewhere else every now and then. (avoiding this problem might be another good “stupid question”...)
I used to have the same problems, but I solved it with a Beeminder goal of doing 10 minutes of cleaning per day (6 days a week).
Even with very little money on the line ($0 or 5$), I still had enough incentive to actually punch in 10 minutes on the microwave timer and turn into a Tasmanian Cleaning Devil until I heard the ding!!
I feel strangely accomplished afterwards (both for having the discipline to fulfill my commitment on Beeminder and for having an orderly house). I was and still am able to maintain extraordinary levels of cleanliness ever since!
I decided to test the “not fun” part of the cost, by doing some cleaning and really asking myself how I felt while I was doing it. The answer was “not bad, almost relaxing”. So I will try to update my model.
Presumably there is some reason you want a cleaner house, e.g. it will be easier to find stuff. If you spend 90 minutes cleaning, that will get you half as much gain in terms of making it easier to find stuff. So it’s still worth doing in its own right. (Similarly, every marginal minute of exercise buys you 3-7 marginal minutes of life (within reason). Etc. This doesn’t work for everything but it works for some things.)
Make a plan that you can do in 90 minutes, where the outcome will be better than the starting position.
Next time, make another 90-minute plan.
Maybe this will be less effective in total, e.g. you might need three or four 90-minute sessions to accomplish what you could do in a single 180-minute session. But if the 180-minute session is unavailable, this is the best option you have.
For example: Instead of vacuuming the whole house, do one room at a time. Instead of putting all things to their places, on day 1 collect all things and put them into a temporary basket, and on day 2 take a few random things from the basket and put them where they belong.
The issue is that, normally, there is a sharp transition from “enough clutter to feel messy and be hard to find things” to “clean enough that I can find things and it doesn’t feel cluttered”. This transition is in the last 30 minutes or so of the 3 hours. This means that:
on day 1 collect all things and put them into a temporary basket, and on day 2 take a few random things from the basket and put them where they belong.
will help solve the first half of the problem (feeling cluttered), even though it won’t help as much with the second half (finding things). The trick will be to actually go back and unpack the temporary clutter storage space. I expect this won’t be too hard, since I will be reminded every time I need something that is inside of it.
I think I’m having trouble with the ‘expectancy’ part of the equation. That is, I know that I will fail to complete the task now. Or, maybe you would say that the immediate value is almost zero.
I have this issue with motivation. I need to clean my house, but I have a difficult time getting myself to do it, unless I think I can finish it all at once. For example, based on past experience, it takes me around three hours of focused effort to get things from where they are now to satisfactory, but I only have ninety minutes. While I could get half-way there now, and finish up sometime later in the week, I imagine myself working hard for 90 minutes, and still having a messy house. Then I do something else instead, unless I’m in a state where cleaning seems less unpleasant than usual.
Does anybody have advice for combating this problem?
(edited for a typo)
Don’t tell yourself that you’re half-cleaning the house. Tell yourself that you’re fully cleaning those rooms(which happen to be half the house). That way, you’re actually completing something.
Yes. Reward your self mentally for cleaning part of the house, instead of punishing yourself mentally for not cleaning it all. Then you will feel motivated to do it next time again.
If you cleaned really frequently in small bursts (say, for 20 minutes a day, almost every day?), starting from your “satisfactory” point, would that be enough to maintain the satisfactory point more or less continuously? Then each 20-minute burst of work would come with the “satisfactory state” reward.
Yes, this is what I try to do, and it is what I am able to do for, typically, a couple months at a time. Having someone else remind me that this is better than three hours all at once is good though. For some reason, I find myself slowly ignoring this advice from myself if I don’t hear it from somewhere else every now and then. (avoiding this problem might be another good “stupid question”...)
I used to have the same problems, but I solved it with a Beeminder goal of doing 10 minutes of cleaning per day (6 days a week).
Even with very little money on the line ($0 or 5$), I still had enough incentive to actually punch in 10 minutes on the microwave timer and turn into a Tasmanian Cleaning Devil until I heard the ding!!
I feel strangely accomplished afterwards (both for having the discipline to fulfill my commitment on Beeminder and for having an orderly house). I was and still am able to maintain extraordinary levels of cleanliness ever since!
I’m not very good at it either! :)
An update:
I decided to test the “not fun” part of the cost, by doing some cleaning and really asking myself how I felt while I was doing it. The answer was “not bad, almost relaxing”. So I will try to update my model.
Presumably there is some reason you want a cleaner house, e.g. it will be easier to find stuff. If you spend 90 minutes cleaning, that will get you half as much gain in terms of making it easier to find stuff. So it’s still worth doing in its own right. (Similarly, every marginal minute of exercise buys you 3-7 marginal minutes of life (within reason). Etc. This doesn’t work for everything but it works for some things.)
Make a plan that you can do in 90 minutes, where the outcome will be better than the starting position.
Next time, make another 90-minute plan.
Maybe this will be less effective in total, e.g. you might need three or four 90-minute sessions to accomplish what you could do in a single 180-minute session. But if the 180-minute session is unavailable, this is the best option you have.
For example: Instead of vacuuming the whole house, do one room at a time. Instead of putting all things to their places, on day 1 collect all things and put them into a temporary basket, and on day 2 take a few random things from the basket and put them where they belong.
Ah, okay, this helps a lot.
The issue is that, normally, there is a sharp transition from “enough clutter to feel messy and be hard to find things” to “clean enough that I can find things and it doesn’t feel cluttered”. This transition is in the last 30 minutes or so of the 3 hours. This means that:
will help solve the first half of the problem (feeling cluttered), even though it won’t help as much with the second half (finding things). The trick will be to actually go back and unpack the temporary clutter storage space. I expect this won’t be too hard, since I will be reminded every time I need something that is inside of it.
One of the most popular LW posts ever is on this topic:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/
Yes, I’ve read that. Thanks for the reminder.
I think I’m having trouble with the ‘expectancy’ part of the equation. That is, I know that I will fail to complete the task now. Or, maybe you would say that the immediate value is almost zero.