It's Your Home, Stop Doing Low-Value Work Here, Too!

One of the Harvard Business Review's most popular articles, Stop Doing Low-Value Work, got me thinking about how we could apply this principle to our own homes and housework. What tasks do you perform that eat up your precious being home time for little or no actual value to you?

Last week, I wrote about drying dishes by hand, which my sweetheart likes to do but I never do when I'm by myself. I have a dishrack; the dishwasher has a dry setting that works perfectly well. Since we have and use few dishes, I rarely load the dishwasher unless we've had a party or someone's been ill; I just do the few in the sink while I'm waiting for water to boil for tea. So there's one 20 minute task I don't do even though there are people who would say I "should." What other ones can I come up with? Can I spare myself more time for people and things I enjoy more, and not just busying myself with other low-value tasks? Does anyone really care if I don't iron their t-shirts when I do mine?  (The answer is No.)

There's time, which most of us have precious little of, there's money which most of us also have precious little of. When I was younger, I enjoyed hustling dawn until dusk and didn't care if my laundry sat in a heap, and the sink was full of dishes until the weekend; now that I'm middle-aged, this doesn't work for me.  I hustle because I need to do it, but I do it as wisely as I can so I can enjoy my at-home time without spending all of my evenings and weekends making my life bearably tidy and clean. You can, too.

Time and the Comfort of Home

Long ago, I was housesitting for friends while they were taking a much-needed vacation, and cleaning the house so they'd come home to a fresh space. Without much thought, I improvised a temporary clothesline outside and washed and line dried the blankets, pillows, mattress covers, the whole thing. It was Spring, and it seemed the easy and obvious thing to do, one of those yearly tasks nobody enjoys doing but everyone enjoys afterward.

After they'd come back, I think it was perhaps a month later, I happened to be by, and the woman from the couple remarked to me sadly that while she appreciated my hard work, she wished I hadn't touched their bed. She liked the comfortable smell of their blankets after a long winter and was sad to come home and have it gone. I apologized automatically, but my mind reeled. Why would anyone want ... but wait. Why do we do anything in our homes, O Melancholy Hammer? Because they aren't hotel rooms. They're homes. Absolutely nothing about this situation has to make sense to me - it only needs to make sense to them. To say the word home is the evocation of the personal, the place where nobody who lives there needs to rationalize anything at all. It's a holy place.

I have a partner who enjoys drying dishes. I've always thought it was unnecessary, barring visible spots on glasses (or when I'm working in a fine home with silverware and dishes that require such care) when there's a dishrack, and I have other things to attend to. But there is no way in the world I'd want to give up the experience of washing while he dries; that gentle swing and sway of our bodies next to each other as we go about this simple task. I try to schedule dishwashing when he's around just so we can work together, and that in itself is inconvenient to me but absolutely worth it. He's also an expert folder, and though I could do it faster myself, I also schedule laundry so we can work together. I do this not because it's efficient - I do it because the routine is part of what makes this place a home. Efficiency is nice, but if it supplants acts of love, it's not a win.

One of the real pleasures of working for yourself is knowing you have a different time bank than other people; tasks must still be done, but the order of operations is mine to choose. I don't believe I'd be successful as a "regular" housecleaner, sprinting from one bleach and pine solvent smelling apartment to the next and not really looking at any house as a home. There's no time for that when you're working hourly. As far as ways to make a living go, that seems like an exhausting and unfulfilling job. When I come home, I am tired, very tired indeed; but I am as happy and satisfied as I could ever be after work, and ready for an evening of reading and working on my novel. As an investment in the quality of life for other people, I think a lot about my responsibility to help and to plan the details into the day that matter even when they aren't immediately noticeable. I try to make time to clip the dead leaves from the houseplants and give them a half-turn for sunlight symmetry, or wash, starch and iron some curtains that have seen better days. To make a house feel like home.

At my housekeeper jobs (these are separate from the one-time cleanout or organization work I often do) I have time to plan. When I first get there, I can coat the oven with baking soda and slip the burners into Ziplocs with some ammonia, run around the house and pick up the laundry, noting what needs to be done in each room, start a load, spritz down the showers and bathtubs to give them time to dissolve the hard water stains, and then start on picking up and putting away objects in each room, dusting as I go, making a note of anything which needs extra polishing or cat hair removal. I like working alone, sketching out in my notebooks what can be done today and what can be pushed to the next week, questions about seasonal items, make and bring the goop to clean computer keyboards next time, pick up a new washer for the bathroom sink, all of that. I don't feel like I'd have time to do what I do best, as a regular housecleaner. I wouldn't have time to make the comfort level many tired people aspire to have. I don't always make the right choices, and wash the blankets, for example. But I do try.

It's a luxury, to be able to choose who to work with. Most of us can't do that. If I wanted to pick better money, I could hire a team and do the whirlwind cleaning jobs some people like - because some people really do like hotel rooms; but I choose different work instead. Comprehensive work with kinder people, creating lasting comforts. I want to think about the people I work for and smile. And I do.

What Became of it

I was thinking the other day about some vintage gloves I'd given away to an acquaintance, one I'd hoped would become a friend but never did. I wondered if they had ever been worn, if perhaps they had been thrown away or sold. I was sad, and wished that I had kept them, but of course I couldn't as I was frantically downsizing in a crisis and couldn't take them with me. It's hard to come to terms with a fizzled friendship, but it's easy to focus on the material objects we held in common for a while. Why did our friendship not flourish? So many subtle reasons, so many factors I can never wholly know and have probably embellished or forgotten in time. But I can clearly see the gloves: they were mine, and then they were a gift that made me feel generous and joyful in a time of grief, and then they were gone and so was the recipient. Her features have faded in my memory; the pattern of the gloves has not. Why?

It happens, that sometimes we give away objects and they don't make the recipients as glad as we'd hoped, or they don't seem as tied to them (or, if we extrapolate as object-oriented people often do, to us) as we'd imagined they would be.  Maybe we'd given away something we were still emotinally attached to, because we cared for a person or because we had too many objects and hoped to find new, caring homes for some of them. Maybe we thought the person needed that thing, but they didn't see it that way.  Maybe wastefulness upsets us, and we watch things being heaved in a dumpster with horror. Maybe it's upsetting that we kept some stupid thing (rubber band ball, anyone?) for years and it's just plain worthless to everyone we ask, and no home can be found for it. We cannot make someone cherish

(Un)fashionable Me

Over the last 30 or so years I've dipped in and out of fashion (I have a love/hate relationship with sewing and mending/modifying). Sometimes I like to be cutting edge, sometimes I like being purposefully out of fashion, for the last five years I mostly just wore jeans and nondescript t-shirts. But continuity has been a linchpin of my looks - wearing a dress for ten, even twenty years in different ways, cutting it in two to make a top or skirt when another part is damaged, that sort of thing. I still held on to vintage or unusual clothes I'd had back when I lived in Hamtramck, and wore them sometimes to class at Boise State University; but I mostly stopped wearing them when I left Idaho. I didn't want to stand out. I wanted to not draw attention to myself. I wanted to seem more normal, more responsible, more hire-able, more like my old boyfriend's friends,

Our possessions can define and heal us

I thought it might be useful to talk about my personal experience with a mental health issue concerning fear and sadness. It happened just before I began working with other people on their homes, long years ago. The sadness turned my ownership of family things into a kind of obsession for me: I could not let go of objects that reminded me of love I once had (or wished I had), and they became "holy objects" even though not one of them was "valuable."

I cringe when I remember screaming at my then-boyfriend for breaking a teacup that