Dishes before music

I'll have to admit:

I am naturally lazy.

If I had to choose between today and tomorrow, I'd naturally pick the latter. "Sufficient is the day's trouble," as the verse goes 🥲

The usual result of that is that "the whole kitchen ends up in the sink".
All the pots, pans, dishes, spoons, forks, knifes and cutting boards slowly accumulate, until I finally bring myself to wash the dishes—hopefully on the weekend. It is bad enough that I ration recipes based on how many pots and pans they use!—a good recipe requires no more than two pans, a great one requires just a vegetable cutting board and a pot.

So, it might surprise you that for the past week, my sink has looked like this:

What happened? "Dishes before music"

Personal rules rule

Recently, I had a thought: what if I told myself I couldn't listen to music, unless I have washed all the dirty dishes first?

It is something others have done as well. James from Atomic Habits calls it temptation bundling, the idea of tying something that needs to be done as a requirement to something that one enjoys doing. Likewise, on writing communities, I've seen people set rewards for finishing some amount of writing, both as a way to celebrate progress, and as an extra goal to motivate their work.

In that sense, "dishes before music" is me rewarding myself for doing the dishes with my daily dose of music.

However, it is more that just that. Unlike a simple reward, my rule it clearly outlines my way of dealing with failure to wash dishes turn off the music¹—just. Meanwhile, if stated the rule as "after washing the dishes, I will listen to music" (as James suggests), it would leave me with a lot of questions related to whether I might listen to music in other circumstances too—say when I finish some homework... and that would undermine the effectiveness of the rule.

A few other things that seem to make this rule work for me:

• It is really simple. "dishes before music" is a just three words, that just happen to "click" for me.
• I enjoy the reward. Especially recently, provoked by some friends to find fresher music, I am quite loving listening to music as I work.
• I don't depend on the reward. I can always work without music, so I'm not tempted to break my rule in order to get something done.
• Punishment is not cruel. A clean kitchen is nice-to-have, but so is music. If I had done "dishes before food" instead, for example, I would have despised my own rule as soon as I got hungry.
• Reward is easy to observe. I can just hear the music when I've washed the dishes. Meanwhile, if I rewarding myself with e.g. my favorite ice cream (vanilla), I wouldn't feel either effects or either success or failure unless I happened to pass by an ice cream booth outside or checked the freezer.
• It doesn't force my schedule. I've tried other ways of organizing myself like blocking time or forcing a certain order of things during the day—yet, in both cases, there is always that one day where traveling, waking up late, or having an early-morning call shifts the whole schedule and ends up breaking the rule.

The results

So far, this has been just the first week of me following my "Dishes before music" rule. It's working well for now, but I'll have to see how it pans out in the longer term, as personal rules have the bad tendency to die out after about two weeks.

One thing I didn't expect to notice is that it is much easier to wash the dishes right away than after they've set around for longer, since greasy spots have much less time to harden. Especially with molten cheeses. 😅

I am also attempting a few other rules, inspired by this one, with mixed success:

• "Exercise before computer"—"exercise" is too vague, and I sometimes need the computer right away, so it ends up being a suggestion for now.
• "Bible before social media"—way more effective that my earlier "Bible first thing in the day" attempt, plus shifts my doomscrolling to when I'm more awake.
• "Math homework before distractions"—math taking too long to complete and distractions being easy to reach for make this a hard sell.

But of course, habit building takes time, and this is just the start of one dish-washing habit. Here's to hoping it sticks, and that the technique generalizes to other things too!

Anyway, that's all from me for now. This is my first post of #100DaysToOffload, so expect more to come 🙂