Cleaning is Rarely the Wrong Answer

I don't know about you, but many of my projects have awkward points where I'm either struck by analysis paralysis, or simple uncertainty.

Those two sound quite similar but under the hood they're distinct. Let's deal with the former first - this occurs when I can't be confident in the critical path for a project. I'll give a real example to better explain - let's say I'm building and painting a complicated miniature vehicle with a visible interior. The interior will be difficult to reach if not painted before assembly is finished, but it means switching from building and blocking in basic colours to a sub-assembly. The interior will need to be completely finished, detailed, weathered, and so on whilst the rest of the build is on hold. On the surface that might be the obvious choice, but there's a very real chance that I'd end up burning a lot of the time and energy I have available and only get the interior finished. Switching back to the exterior is likely to be very mentally taxing and the project might stall out completely. Would I be able to be satisfied with a lower quality interior but a completed project? The calculus of it is tricky and depends as much on the weather as anything to do with the painting process!

The second kind of uncertainty is thankfully much simpler to explain - which bit do I work on next? There's no element of min/maxing here, it's as simple as "Do I want to finish soldering this part of the circuit or that one?". It's unlikely there's a wrong answer but sometimes a bit of mild executive dysfunction raises its head (or doesn't, it hasn't made up its mind. Sorry, couldn't resist.).

At times like this, cleaning is my go-to, because cleaning is rarely the wrong answer.

It seems mundane, I know, but lots of the most important things in life are mundane. That's why they're so common!

We can get into a bit more detail on the hows and whys though and perhaps I can convince you.

The first is that by the time I reach these kinds of uncertainty points I've usually been working on the project for quite some time. I try to tidy as I go but I invariably fail, so there's normally project debris on many surfaces, under my feet, on the dog, etc.. Taking a break to try to straighten things up a bit helps reset the workspace somewhat, prevents the missus from being quite so exasperated (as covered in a previous chapter, she's just as bad!), and gives me back space to work in. I should probably have stopped to tidy up regardless, but that's less fun that pressing on with the build, so I didn't - time to fix that.

The second reason is less practical but just as important - the project clutter generates mental noise. It's a buzzing hive of "when you get a minute", "you're not done until", and "don't forget to return" thoughts trying to butt into my consciousness. They're usually not persistent enough to reach fully-formed thoughts, but having them hovering is enough to make things slightly more difficult. Not a deal breaker if I'm powering on with a project, but if I've hit an uncertainty point I need as much of my brain available as possible to progress. Taking the time to tidy them away helps free up mental resources to deal with the problem.

Third is probably most obvious - the "shower thought" approach to problem solving. Stepping away to focus on something else can really help bring perspective and clarity to the issue. Of course, it doesn't always work, but even when it doesn't, the workspace still got tidied, didn't it?

Mess Begets Mess

As with many other things this has a surface level of obviousness to it but having these things spelled out explicitly can make a tremendous difference. It's the sort of thing that if internalised can become the sort of thing that gives the needed mental kick in the arse to do something tedious when it's easier not to.

During my many years of renting throughout the UK I've had to deep clean places. Occasionally some bright spark would chime in with words to the effect of "if you cleaned more regularly this would be easier". On the one hand, they'd be right, however to my mind the deep clean as a separate task was much more mentally palatable than the constant drag of cleaning-based chores. Sacrificing fifteen minutes every week would drive me nuts, so I would mostly avoid it. Instead I'd spend a few hours, a couple of times per year, properly cleaning. The end result was the same, although if I was the sort to be bothered by dust it probably wouldn't be quite so simple!

These days I do clean more regularly, although I still avoid dusting unless it's properly bad. However I've led you up the garden path a smidge here: this section isn't actually about cleaning - it's about tidying. Of course, I've done this because there's an important contrast to observe.

Tidying only when it's desperately needed isn't really the same at all. Having (unintentionally) cluttered surfaces and work areas acts as a barrier to doing anything. If it's some actively in-progress work on a project that's still there because it was time for lunch, that's one thing, but if it's a perpetual state of tools sprawled across a surface, things haphazardly shoved into boxes, and so on then that's rather another.

Aside from the immediately obvious practical difficulties this causes there's the something much more important at play - the habits it can encourage. Do something often enough and those neural pathways get reinforced and if the thing you're training yourself to do is to not bother tidying it becomes easier to keep doing.

After all - it's already untidy, it's always untidy, what difference can you make?

That's the thing - if you can try to teach yourself to tidy things away then you'll find that, over time, it gets easier. The messy project piles don't immediately vanish, it's not a magic trick, but if you can at least avoid making them worse, then you're on the right track. A smaller mess is easier to not contribute to if you've taught yourself to not make it worse!

You should probably clean too, but the level of mankiness you're willing to live with is not my concern!

Clean-up Shouldn't Take More Than Five Minutes

Tying into the previous section - tidying can be really tedious, particularly if the level of chaos has reached daunting proportions. The way we've tried to tackle this is by trying to design our spaces, storage solutions, and projects (where possible) to be easy to tidy up. It's not the primary concern when setting these things up, but it's high up the list. We know we can't be trusted and will use spaces for evil if this principle isn't borne in mind.

For us that has involved things like open wardrobes, project boxes sized to avoid being too complex to use (rather than super-clever containers with nested compartments), limiting how much is allowed in a given cupboard (i.e. it's full long before all the space is used), and dedicated spaces for things to be stored (that may not be used for other things "just for now"!).

The idea, as the section title suggests, is to make tidying up trivial. There's also the rather important factor with this that it informs how much energy can be spent on a project in a given window of time. Rather than having the lurking thought that clean-up is going to be a nightmare, tidying up feels relatively trivial. As a result more time and energy can be spent on the fun bit!

Not All Messes are Created Equal

Ultimately when working on projects, things are going to get messy. It's inevitable and we all have to make peace with that. It's okay!

That said, I feel like many of us were raised to think of mess as some sort of monolithic thing. In reality it's far more nuanced than that. To me the worst kind of mess involves a surface covered in multiple projects belonging to several people. Such a mess I cannot realistically do much about without violating the other person's project space, something that I find rather abhorrent. I wouldn't want someone interfering with my project space without explicit permission, I won't do it to someone else!

The other end of the scale is a mess of a specific material related to a project. For example I have a bag full of waterslide transfers. They're not in any particular order and I just sort through them when I need them. One could argue that they're not a mess, but what else would you call stuff shoved into a bag with no regard for order?

Most messes fit somewhere between those two and the idea is to try to keep them closer to the easy end. Even if it's just shifting them slightly in that direction, it's a good step.

I started thinking about this because I noticed that the missus had been conditioned to condense stuff when tidying, rather than to categorise it (having seen her mother's house, I know who to blame!). This works as a short term fix (such as if the dining table is needed because guests are coming around) so has value to some extent. If the same approach is applied to most tidying it causes a proliferation of compacted messes, which is less helpful.

Essentially what I'm trying to convey is to think about the kind of tidying you're doing. Multiple easier messes might be better than a single complex mess. At some point you're going to have to deal with it so do your future self a favour and give them less of a headache if you can.

Hiding Mess vs. Tidying

I always think of a scene in the comedy Black Books in which one of the characters' parents are about to arrive. The book shop is a tremendous mess, as always, and Manny is panicking. His friend, Fran, teaches him to hide the mess using Indian throws (a kind of blanket, I guess?).

This section is here to ask you to consider your goal when attempting to tidy an area. Are you trying to make it more presentable or are you attempting to establish order?

Both have their place, so don't take this as an indightment of the former! If you're renting a space you may need to cause short term pain by giving the appearance of greater order than is present when your landlord wants to see how the space is used. It'd be nice if that sort of thing wasn't an issue but ultimately it is. A project in full swing can resemble a catastrophe quite closely to the untrained eye, after all!

The other reason to hide mess is more practical - surfaces covered in clutter are much harder to clean. It might well make sense to haphazardly stack things into superficially neat piles (see the previous section) so that the shavings can be swept up, the paint wiped off, or the stickiness dealt with. Of course, this may mean that you have more work ahead of you later, redeploying the mess to be able to properly tidy it, but that might well be preferable than getting sidetracked by it when you're in "cleaning mode". I don't put down the vacuum cleaner and work on the specific contents of a pile, otherwise I'd get half the hoovering done and a third of the tidying. Better to at least finish one stage of the maintenance!

Resetting Areas

Perhaps it's just my upbringing, but I don't really have that good a relationship with some of the fundamental concepts behind tidying. I'm not overly concerned with other people's potential disapproval if my home is untidy, I have the whole not-a-"proper"-adult imposter syndrome thing if it's messy, etc.. This means that I tend to need a stronger mental justification to lift a finger to sort out a given area.

One of the framings I've found helps me is to think of the space as having a default state, one that I like, which it must be "reset" to in order to get maximum utility/enjoyment/etc. from it. Assuming I've crafted the default state well then I tend to find it creatively encouraging to spend time in, for want of a better way of putting it. I sit down at it and it tacitly invites me to start working on something fun.

Having spaces around me that trigger that feeling makes me happier, so I want more of that! This stands in stark contrast to my father's approach, which is to leave a space in a terrible state and only do the bare minimum to clear just enough space to work on whatever currently has his attention as and when he needs it.

Thinking of tidying as being the process of resetting it to an inviting state, making it ready for another creative session, helps my brain justify spending the effort to tidy up, rather than doing almost anything else. I would imagine there are many other useful framing devices, but hopefully this one is a starting point to help you find what works for you!

Muscle Memory

Throughout this chapter I've talked about forming new habits but I've been saving the best for last. Skip it if you're already aware of this trick, as with any other section, but to me this was a revelation. Then again, my parents weren't exactly paragons of tidiness, so perhaps other people knew this. Enough build up, the trick is that muscle memory can be used to tidy.

Pick a simple chore that you find tedious and force your body to perform it enough times and it will become part of your subconscious skills and then you no longer have to think about it. It's annoying to do, obviously, but I found I was able to teach my hands to tidy away tools from my desk without any conscious effort. Sometimes I find pens in there because my mind wandered (it's a painting desk - pens don't belong there but sometimes visit). I went to continue writing on the notepad I'd brought over and found I'd lost my writing implement. My sneaky mitts had neatly tidied the damn thing away!

There's bound to be loads of ways this can be useful but I came to it later in life so I'm only just finding out now. Now if only I could make vacuuming the workspace muscle memory...