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Decluttering
Sep. 14th, 2021 12:58 pmI’m reading _Unf*ck Your Habitat_, and while it has a number of elements that are at least in principle appealing, I doubt I will finish it, and I don’t recommend it.
The core of the book — and it is not easy to find — is the 20/10. This is a modification of the Pomodoro Technique, which is typically presented as 25/5, and the Pomodoro technique always has within it the seeds of adjusting the size of the work / play components. Most presentations of Pomodoro do recognize that 25/5 will require longer breaks at larger intervals. The 20/10 approach, by contrast, has built into it a lot more sustainability. It is also a clear recognition that many, many, many meaningful household tasks can be done in 20 minutes or less _if we tackle them that way_. A lot of household tasks are tackled as large tasks (vacuum the whole house, or an entire floor, vs. vacuum the high traffic portion of one room); the 20/10 approach puts enormous pressure on reducing the size of tasks to something completable within 20 minutes.
The other benefit of 20/10 is that 10 minutes is enough time to actually enjoy doing something — 5 minutes is about the amount of time it will take to _think_ of what you want to do with your break, not enough to think of it, do it, and then restart. 5 minutes is enough time to go to the bathroom, get a drink of water, maybe shove a cookie in your mouth, and that’s about it. 10 minutes is enough time to make a cup of tea.
As with many (maybe all) time management / personal organization / decluttering / etc. type books, the core idea is then deployed against most of the space covered by these types of books. The result is a book that is highly repetitive and extremely uneven in quality. While the author is delightfully aware of the gender problems of “traditional” division of domestic tasks, and while the author does not insult the reader by suggesting it is somehow the reader’s fault for not doing a better job drawing the other party into doing their own fucking job keeping things decent around the living quarters, the author does not appear to have anything particularly inspiring beyond the usual (directly talk about it, make lists of tasks and frequencies). On the other hand, the author _does_ openly acknowledge the draw of streaming media, podcasts, etc., and explicitly suggests creating a cleaning / decluttering / tidying environment that lets you do both at the same time. As I noted, it is very uneven. Also, I find this particular book (sorta like one of the Adulting books I tried reading) uses a lot of super validating talk (it’s hard, it’s going to take a long time) followed by a lot of Go Clean Your Room Now talk. It is unnerving and trigger-y if you are reading it for the reasons I am. I’m here for the tips and tricks. I’m not a perfectionist, and I worked very hard for years to not fall back into that trap, and the Just Go Do It parts of the book are enraging and profoundly de-motivating. It’s also more than a little weird to read someone direct the reader to do something that I had to work incredibly hard to _stop_ doing (or at least get a lot more control over when I do it). Her descriptions of clean-as-you-go cooking and so forth were especially difficult to read. If these are habits you _want_ to develop, you could give this book a try. It’s caused more backsliding than I am comfortable really getting into the details of.
I’ve been on twitter a fair amount lately, watching as discourse finally moves away from All Covid All the Time to the mundane realities of restarting the global economy. Recently, the book publishing industry has been pushing people to pre-order anything they’ll want by the holiday season (!!!). The problem seems to have a lot of components, but paper plants shifting from goods-to-make-books to paper-packaging as plastic becomes increasingly unacceptable is an important part of the difficulty, along with, obviously, boats, trucks, etc. I’ve always done a lot of my shopping DTC / mail order / wtf (even before I was at Amazon, I was a customer, and before that, I’d been doing mail order for years usually with paper catalogs and a phone, but sometimes mailing in the order via snail mail), and the last year and a half has been unusual in many ways, but my learning curve was more about figuring out how to avoid Amazon since it was completely overrun by new customers, and setting up accounts with companies that traditionally wouldn’t serve me because I wasn’t running a business. There was a lot of guilt out there being dished out for making anyone do any more work than absolutely necessary, and I wasn’t going anywhere fancy anyway, so my clothing orders were very, very limited. So off I went to LB and Kohl’s (online) to order fresh shirts and so forth. Wow. I’ve _never_ seen LB have so many items in “New Arrivals” sold out in so many sizes. Yikes! Anyway. After that, I went through the dresser and the closet to make sure there would be space when the new things arrived. As expected, a lot of stuff got pulled less because I didn’t love it, and more because of the amount of pilling — I usually refresh things faster than this.
It was not a time consuming process, and it was surprisingly enjoyable, as I haven’t done it in a while so it there was a lot of low hanging fruit.
The core of the book — and it is not easy to find — is the 20/10. This is a modification of the Pomodoro Technique, which is typically presented as 25/5, and the Pomodoro technique always has within it the seeds of adjusting the size of the work / play components. Most presentations of Pomodoro do recognize that 25/5 will require longer breaks at larger intervals. The 20/10 approach, by contrast, has built into it a lot more sustainability. It is also a clear recognition that many, many, many meaningful household tasks can be done in 20 minutes or less _if we tackle them that way_. A lot of household tasks are tackled as large tasks (vacuum the whole house, or an entire floor, vs. vacuum the high traffic portion of one room); the 20/10 approach puts enormous pressure on reducing the size of tasks to something completable within 20 minutes.
The other benefit of 20/10 is that 10 minutes is enough time to actually enjoy doing something — 5 minutes is about the amount of time it will take to _think_ of what you want to do with your break, not enough to think of it, do it, and then restart. 5 minutes is enough time to go to the bathroom, get a drink of water, maybe shove a cookie in your mouth, and that’s about it. 10 minutes is enough time to make a cup of tea.
As with many (maybe all) time management / personal organization / decluttering / etc. type books, the core idea is then deployed against most of the space covered by these types of books. The result is a book that is highly repetitive and extremely uneven in quality. While the author is delightfully aware of the gender problems of “traditional” division of domestic tasks, and while the author does not insult the reader by suggesting it is somehow the reader’s fault for not doing a better job drawing the other party into doing their own fucking job keeping things decent around the living quarters, the author does not appear to have anything particularly inspiring beyond the usual (directly talk about it, make lists of tasks and frequencies). On the other hand, the author _does_ openly acknowledge the draw of streaming media, podcasts, etc., and explicitly suggests creating a cleaning / decluttering / tidying environment that lets you do both at the same time. As I noted, it is very uneven. Also, I find this particular book (sorta like one of the Adulting books I tried reading) uses a lot of super validating talk (it’s hard, it’s going to take a long time) followed by a lot of Go Clean Your Room Now talk. It is unnerving and trigger-y if you are reading it for the reasons I am. I’m here for the tips and tricks. I’m not a perfectionist, and I worked very hard for years to not fall back into that trap, and the Just Go Do It parts of the book are enraging and profoundly de-motivating. It’s also more than a little weird to read someone direct the reader to do something that I had to work incredibly hard to _stop_ doing (or at least get a lot more control over when I do it). Her descriptions of clean-as-you-go cooking and so forth were especially difficult to read. If these are habits you _want_ to develop, you could give this book a try. It’s caused more backsliding than I am comfortable really getting into the details of.
I’ve been on twitter a fair amount lately, watching as discourse finally moves away from All Covid All the Time to the mundane realities of restarting the global economy. Recently, the book publishing industry has been pushing people to pre-order anything they’ll want by the holiday season (!!!). The problem seems to have a lot of components, but paper plants shifting from goods-to-make-books to paper-packaging as plastic becomes increasingly unacceptable is an important part of the difficulty, along with, obviously, boats, trucks, etc. I’ve always done a lot of my shopping DTC / mail order / wtf (even before I was at Amazon, I was a customer, and before that, I’d been doing mail order for years usually with paper catalogs and a phone, but sometimes mailing in the order via snail mail), and the last year and a half has been unusual in many ways, but my learning curve was more about figuring out how to avoid Amazon since it was completely overrun by new customers, and setting up accounts with companies that traditionally wouldn’t serve me because I wasn’t running a business. There was a lot of guilt out there being dished out for making anyone do any more work than absolutely necessary, and I wasn’t going anywhere fancy anyway, so my clothing orders were very, very limited. So off I went to LB and Kohl’s (online) to order fresh shirts and so forth. Wow. I’ve _never_ seen LB have so many items in “New Arrivals” sold out in so many sizes. Yikes! Anyway. After that, I went through the dresser and the closet to make sure there would be space when the new things arrived. As expected, a lot of stuff got pulled less because I didn’t love it, and more because of the amount of pilling — I usually refresh things faster than this.
It was not a time consuming process, and it was surprisingly enjoyable, as I haven’t done it in a while so it there was a lot of low hanging fruit.