Hello there! It’s 4am in Montreal as I am starting to write this post. This is what insomnia feels like. It almost never happens to me. Watching Breaking Bad before going to bed and dreaming about it did not really help. So I made some coffee and I’m just going to start my day a little earlier. And since it is early and I have nothing planned until later today, I thought that I could bother you with a new post.
It’s about why I actually love doing dishes. Not really that I enjoy the fact of washing dishes but I like it when everything is done.
We had a dishwasher before. Actually we got it almost for free when we moved in this apartment. After a year or so it started to make weird noises. I tried to repair it but completely failed. So one night I put it on the sidewalk and some scrappers took it after 15 minutes ; that’s good efficiency on the part of these scrappers considering there was a snow storm that night. (Note: I’m not really the kind of guy who just put a broken dishwasher on the sidewalk, I would normally take it somewhere to be recycled but I called the city recycling department and they told me: “put it on the sidewalk, some scrappers will take it” and that’s what happened).
Since then, we have washed our dishes manually like normal people (and I mean ‘normal people’ in terms of “Humanity spent more time doing dishes by hand rather than using a robot”) and I’ve started to find an interest and even enjoyed it. I think it started with something that my Grand-Father taught me when I was a kid. He was a cook and one of his “secrets” was to “always do the dishes as soon as you can, this way everything is always ready to use”. You need that pan? baaam, here it is! So that’s why I do the dishes as soon as I can now. The good side of this is that I usually get a really small amount of dishes to do at a time which is always better than a sink overflowed by dirty plates. I still don’t really like the act of doing the dishes so just a little amount is fine with me.
Everything always ready? Of course I can do this with other stuff:
- Why not trying to answer this email right now instead of waiting for emails to pile up? (I don’t understand how people manage to have several thousand unread emails in their inbox by the way).
- Why not fixing up this little bug in a software instead of waiting the end of the project?
- Write a blog post as soon as I have an idea (or an insomnia)?
- Why not put this dishwasher on the sidewalk right now instead of waiting for another recycling option?
- And why am I waiting to give this phone call when I am playing Angry Birds?…
It’s really incredible the number of little things we can do quickly. After all, every (EVERY!) project is just a sum of small tasks that can be done really fast as they come up. Would we be able to work in “real time” with tasks done as soon as a problem emerge and always be ready for the next thing? That would feel great.
Let’s work on this… but first I have to wash this coffee cup.
(Final note: I am not perfect and I am not that good with other domestic tasks but I am working on it… I’ve experimented with the laundry but I ended up with the famous red sock that got lost with white laundry and coloured everything in pink)
