One of my bad habits is texting / fondling my phone while driving. As of now I promise to stop it completely. It would be pretty stupid to end my (and possibly others) journey here because of some stupid SMS or Twitter update.
Antti
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Photo by striatic
We live in belief that we need bunch of stuff (a great post about this), but we really don’t. In fact more stuff will just make us unhappier.
How to know what we actually need? It’s kind of tricky to analyze your own feelings when a “need” hits you. So how to combat the temptations of new iPhone or new Stieg Larsson bestseller?
We try to follow 30 day rule in getting new stuff. Basically if you “need” something you write it on paper and wait for 30 days. After that you can go ahead and purchase it. That is if you still “need” it.
30 days is long enough time to let you distance yourself from the object and really analyze if you could live without it.
Even the word chore gives me shivers. Chore == something I forgot to do. I just don’t like that word. I need to work around the problem somehow. I try to outline my current way solving this chore thing here.
To get things that I don’t like done, I need some kind of schedule/plan to actually make it happen or eventually to develop that thing to a habit (wishful thinking). I need to make some kind of commitment and it seems that writing it down and putting it on the fridge door is a pretty effective way. Sticking it to the fridge door makes it public (or semi-public), it has my name on it, I personally agreed to it -> Strong commitment.
I’m also sort of famous in planning stuff. Or should I say insisting to have a plan. A clear plan helps me in many ways, but in forming a habit/doing daily tasks it’s a constant reminder of what needs to be done and when. This helped us with our garbage problem (= Meri doing everything and me not worrying/doing anything about it). This way I know on what day I need to accomplish this and that Meri is also aware of this -> I really need to do it.
I cannot promise it will work on everything though! Cleaning is a good example. I’ve made numerous plans and schedules (like 15 min cleaning on Mon and Wed, then 30 min on Friday nights) which all sounded great, but never really worked. I guess there never was enough motivation for me so public commitment didn’t really help with this problem. Luckily this problem was eventually solved. Solved by me hiring a cleaning lady :) Which I’m glad I did it and can wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone!
My plan to How to Get Everyday Chores Done is
1. Commit publicly
2. Plan/schedule
3. Outsource – Hire someone to do the job for you (lazy mans way out ;D)
