When I'm on a sudden burst of motivation to do the boring but necessary work, like tidying up or taking care of admin, I try very hard not to break it. Those bursts are what keep my life running, and it's much harder to engineer one than to sustain it. It'll take twice as long without them, if not longer, and take a quality hit too.
The most common task which will break the streak is taking out the trash. It's stinky and occasionally sticky despite my best efforts to contain everything, and that's just no good. So I don't bag or take it out till the very end, if I do it at all.
That would be mostly fine because I'm generally good about getting literal trash into the trash can promptly. However, when I'm cleaning I run into a lot of almost-trash. Paper which needs to be shredded, packaging which needs to be cleaned and flattened, scraps which need to be sorted into salvageable or useless, items which I had to keep for some duration which has just ended. Taking care of those is the second most common task after putting things away, but I need a trash bag to do it with.
So I just start a new one. It's a habit I avoid in all other circumstances because, like leaving a fresh toilet paper roll on the counter instead of using replacing the empty one, it tends to persist longer than it should. If you're going to let it sit around anyway, better to only have one bag sitting around than two.
But in this case, if it's been sitting around for a week it's not the kind of trash which gets smelly. It's no trouble at all to collect and bag it up to be tossed out. Motivation stays intact.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
As I've said before and will probably say again, I wish trash was a smaller part of my life. It comes up too often.
- Rew