I had a different post on the calendar for today. However, my personal life is all kinds of unstructured lately. I felt inspired to post something a bit more off-the-cuff.
Many of us are facing the end of the school year. A transitional period for our families. Our ingrained routines and structures will invariably get messed up. That sucks for me because I live and die by those routines.
So my inbox is a little out of control and my house isn’t as neat as I’d like. But I haven’t given up entirely. Especially on the house. My quality of life start with my physical surroundings. If I want any hope of digging out of the productivity slump that has been the past two weeks, I need to keep the house clean.
Even though I really don’t have the time, energy, or focus.
I care about a clean house — and I don’t apologize for it.
Just so you know my perspective here: keeping a clean house matters to me. My family has enough dust and mildew allergies to make it feel necessary for our physical health. But my immediate surroundings also have a very real impact on my mental health. Surfaces dulled by dust, my field of vision filled with clutter — I can’t afford to ignore the negative impact this has on my mood and focus.
I realize not everyone experiences this. Perhaps that explains why so many people mount signs over their living rooms with phrases like “bless this mess.” Or why other moms tell me “I’d rather enjoy my kids while they’re young than waste time worrying about how my house looks.” If that works for you, great. It doesn’t work for me. At all. And if it doesn’t work for you either, let me tell you something:
We need to let go of perfection.
If I need to do it right, I’ll never get started.
People with ADHD have a bear of a time getting started on almost anything. And when we try to clean a house we know will look dirty again in two days? Forget about it.
Because getting started on any task requires me to overcome so much inertia, perfectionism tries to take over. It’s easy to convince myself it’s not worth the effort if I don’t have the time or energy to do a complete job.
My upbringing and work ethic play into this, too. My parents told me more than once, if you’re not going to do it right, don’t do it at all. Or, one of my dad’s favorites: don’t do a half-assed job.
Consequently, if I don’t think I can pull off more than a half-assed job, my motivation drops to zero.
Doing it at all beats doing it “right.”
But let me ask you this: is doing a half-assed job really worse than doing nothing at all?
When it comes to cleaning my house, the answer is absolutely not. Half-assed is better than no-assed 100 percent of the time. If I can remove any drain on my mental and physical health, it’s worth it.
Take dusting, for example: dust accumulates under my radiators because I don’t get under there with a rag often enough. But it accumulates more slowly if I vacuum every week. Any action I take, no matter how small, removes allergens from our home’s ecosystem.
I still have to deep-clean a couple times a year. I probably do it less often than I should. But that has no bearing on the weekly efforts I need to make, no matter how half-assed. Plus, those half-assed cleanings make the deep cleaning exponentially easier when I finally get around to it.
My cleaning schedule has been totally disrupted and I’m trying to deal.
A lot of cleaning experts recommend doing this or that on a set routine or establishing daily habits to make cleaning easier. I love routines. They’re great. But they’re also dangerous because I tend to latch onto them for dear life. Everything falls apart the first time something disrupts my routine.
Perfect example: my son had half-days every Friday this school year. I made Friday our cleaning day. After lunch, I spent a few hours dusting and vacuuming all three floors, bucket cleaning one bathroom, and quickly wiping down the other. And when the school year ended, so did my motivation to spend this much time cleaning just because the calendar said Friday.
The kiddo also has a couple weeks off between school and summer camp. This has made my entire life feel unstructured in a way my brain simply cannot handle. I’m having trouble getting to the work I want to do, let alone cleaning the house.
So, fine. Maybe I don’t have an hour to empty out the bathroom and scrub the whole thing with a bucket and rag. Let’s at least swish some toilet cleaner around the bowl and wipe down the sink and counter. I keep toilet cleaner and a container of GreenWorks wipes in each bathroom to make this as easy as possible.
During this chaotic period, will I vacuum around a box of junk on the floor instead of dealing with it? Absolutely. Will dust continue to accumulate on the floor underneath our radiators because the vacuum doesn’t reach all the way under there? You bet it will. Because I prioritize making a crappy effort over making no effort at all.
Sometimes you have to set out to do a bad job.
Maybe you’ve heard a writer talk about the “sh!tty first draft.” We need to write it — even though we know it’ll suck — because we need something to work from. Holding yourself to print-run-ready prose on the first draft guarantees you’ll be too intimidated to write much of anything at all.
When I start writing a first draft, I actually set out to write a crappy one. I know I’m there to do a bad job because doing a bad job will deliver me the rough cut. And I need the rough cut before I can polish it into something beautiful.
Sometimes our lives are a crappy first draft. And that’s okay. I would argue it’s even a necessary part of the process.
So if you’re stuck in a moment (or a decade) of chaos, forget about aiming for perfect. Aim for something. Anything. No matter how half-assed. Because anything you do will be better than nothing. Even the smallest effort can be a huge success if you can repeat it again next week.
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