Sally sighed, looking at her living room windows.
They really needed washing. With window washing, it had always been her habit to set aside a morning or afternoon for it and do all the outsides of the windows of her house. The insides, too, if there was time or her husband was available to help.
But today, she did not have time for a big project. “Why not just wash the ones in the living room?” inquired her husband. “Leave the others for another time.”
While part of her balked inside at not doing a whole window washing job, Sally
saw the sense in what he was saying. The living room was the room where it bothered her most, as well as the room people who visited were most likely to see.
So she just did the living room
windows.
Another day, she did the kitchen and laundry room windows.
Another day, two bedroom windows, and another day the master bed and bath windows.
In less than two
weeks, she had cleaned all of her windows. It did not matter at all that they were not done in one big workday; the result ended up the same.
After that, Sally applied the same idea to other cleaning around the house
too.
Instead of trying to clean all the grout between the floor tiles in one long day, she cleaned it one room at a time. The same with cleaning baseboards. Both of these jobs really tired
her back, and by doing less on separate days, she felt much less uncomfortable when she was done.
Another benefit, she discovered, was that she dreaded the job much less. A big job can appear daunting; breaking it
up can make it feel much more doable.
Even a little cleaning is better than none at all. Life is busy, and many of us find it hard to set aside a day, or even half a day, for big cleaning jobs.
Renee wanted to clean out and reorganize her kitchen drawers. She managed to do seven before she had to get dressed for a meeting. “Well, my kitchen drawers are fifty percent cleaner and more organized than they were. And I can probably do the other half of them over the
weekend.”
It all worked out. She just had to shift her thinking about how it “should” be done.
Is there a big job you have been putting off because you did not have time to complete the whole thing? Perhaps it is time to reconsider the way you have always done it or preferred to do it.
As Sally discovered, even part done is better than none.
What if you cannot do
some big job, like window washing, all in one day? So what? Do what you can. You will have some clean windows and a smaller job when you have time to do the others. And, like Sally, you may discover benefits in changing your established system.
