One Productive Task

I don't think I've mentioned this before... my new cleanup strategy is what I call the One Productive Task method. I try to do One Productive Task, i.e., some bit of household cleanup, every day. I may do more, but at the minimum, I try to do one.

Today, for example, I threw out a couple of old pillows the dog had slept on, along with a few bits of other debris that had been in the living room and dining room.

It's not much, but it's something, and if I keep doing that every day, I'll have the house shipshape by 2018 or thereabouts.

Washington Post reporter Michael S. Rosenwald has written a story about his own struggle with clutter and hoarding.

The Mess He Made: A Life-long Slob Decides It's Time to Get Organized

I would dispute the use of the word 'slob' in the headline. I doubt that Rosenwald shows up at the Post for work every day in dirty clothes or a three-day growth of beard. But, like me, he has a hard time dealing with the accumulation of material possessions.

And it's not status symbols or rich people's toys that are the problem. I don't own a big screen TV or a home theater system, for example. What I have is a bunch of junk, much of which I have described previously. That includes my huge box of 'wall wart' transformers for various electronic doodads long ago burnt out or broken; dozens of CD-ROMs, many of them blank, that have gotten scratched or cracked from being left out of their cases; old books I'll never read again, and so on.

Rosenwald's story is accompanied by a slide show of photos – a few of them apparently staged – showing the clutter in his home and his car. His car is actually worse than mine, but there have been times when mine was worse than his.

But one picture especially caught my attention. It's a picture of his hands emerging from a pile of books, magazines, newspapers and whatnot. And in the upper left hand corner is a roll of toilet paper. What is a roll of toilet paper doing in his home office or den or wherever this is? The same thing they're doing in my den, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom, I suppose. I need to blow my nose, or wipe up a spill, and I grab a roll of TP out of the bathroom because it's the handiest thing. And then the roll just stays wherever I used it.

It dawned on me that I don't spend more than five minutes a day making this house a mess. And if I could spend, say, seven minutes a day cleaning it up, eventually I ought to get caught up. Hence the One Productive Task. It takes about seven minutes. And I have seen a little progress, but only a little. It's like spending seven minutes shoveling sand out of the Sahara Desert.

Back in 2006, I recruited someone to come in and declutter, and she got more done in a day than I would have gotten done in a couple of months.

I've asked her to come back in a few days, and I hope she'll help me get further ahead in this process.

Addendum: A couple of friends suggested I watch "Hoarders" on A&E. I don't have a TV, so I checked the A&E web site, where full episodes are available for viewing. I was so turned off by the 'dum dum DUMMMM!' music and the grainy "se7en"-style graphics that I didn't watch the show. It's a houseful of crap, not the Zodiac killer.