# Floors chores

> On the power of routines. Saturday is 'floors chores' in this house, no matter what.

> 4/31 daily posts as part of [WeblogPoMo2024](https://weblog.anniegreens.lol/weblog-posting-month-2024). Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.

On Saturday morning, I dust and vacuum the house.

Without fail. Every week. For _years_ now.

We call it the 'floors chores' and it's just one of my jobs. I've come to love it: we eat breakfast,[^eggs] I clean the kitchen, then I put on my noise cancelling AirPods and vacuum while listening to [ATP](https://atp.fm).

Routines are powerful but they're hard to establish. We treasure the floors chores because it means our house is always clean. By now it's effortless.

It would be ideal if we could reach this state with our work. In his latest book _Slow Productivity,_[^newport] Cal Newport advocates for the formation of rituals:

> "...form your own personalized rituals around the work you find most important."  
> – _Slow Productivity_, p. 163.

**So why are they so hard to establish?**

## Picture your work day

And by 'work' I just mean whatever it is that you want to get done.

If we assign shapes and colours to tasks, where shapes are analagous to **categories** and colours to **areas** (in Johnny.Decimal parlance), our days mostly look like this.

<JDImage
  alt="Random shapes - boxes, blocks, triangles, circles - in various colours. I did this in a word processor so they've just been typed out; two lines, going from left to right. There's no order to the shapes or the colours."
  class="no-invert"
  folder="blog"
  src="0035A-Shapes_chaos-1248x214@2x.png"
  width={600}
  height={103}
  loading="lazy"
  caption="The types of work you do flow like words on the page, from left to right, then on to the next row."
/>

Chaos! None the wonder you can't concentrate. Every switch is a switch in mental state; in the knowledge that you're holding in working memory; in the files and apps you need open to perform the task.

**This is not the best way to work.**

Let's reimagine. Here's the same shapes, rearranged. And let's introduce some line breaks; perhaps they're _actual_ breaks in your day?

<JDImage
  alt="The same shapes, but rearranged so that each line is now a single colour. On each line, the same shapes have been grouped together. Each line starts with the larger, 'heavier' shapes, and tapers off to the lighter ones."
  class="no-invert"
  folder="blog"
  src="0035B-Shapes_calm-690x488@2x.png"
  width={332}
  height={235}
  loading="lazy"
  caption="Similar shapes have been moved together, and we've moved all of the 'heavy' stuff to the front; maybe it's harder work that you should do while your brain is fresh?"
/>

## Work in categories

I think we usually behave like the first diagram because we haven't sufficiently categorised our work to _enable_ us to behave like the second.

And this calls back to [yesterday's post](/22.00.0034/) and my desire to eliminate 'due dates'.

Imagine establishing a routine such that you know, as sure as I know that I'll do the floors chores next Saturday morning, that on the first Sunday morning of the month you tackle all of those heavy blue boxes.

And say they represent all of your home finances: paying your bills, checking account balances, updating your subscriptions, transferring your health insurance, finding a better savings account.

If you **knew** that you did that every month, **you'd never need to be reminded to do it.**

And you'd never get that slighly panicked feeling: _oh crap, did I forget to pay the credit card this month?_

How nice might that be?

[^eggs]: Usually (but not always) a boiled egg with soldiers.

[^newport]: Review to follow.