Projects, practices, and processes

If you’re going to have to do it every day, it would be good to have the right tools. (Image by Ryan McGuire)

I cleaned the kitchen yesterday. Good for me!

Unfortunately, I only cleaned it after breakfast. I neglected to clean it after dinner, so I have a bunch of dishes, pots, and pans waiting for me this morning.

As much as I’d like to think of cleaning the kitchen as a project that I can just do once and get out of the way, it’s more of a practice — a project that must be done every day, or even more than once a day.

So is decluttering, according to Dana K. White of A Slob Comes Clean. She says that the tendency to think of decluttering — and indeed, the maintenance of a home in general — as a one-and-done project is a key cause of household management problems and the resulting overwhelm.

If we want more consistent results, we have to develop a more consistent practice of doing the work, along with systems and processes that facilitate our work and make it more efficient.

I have improved at my household management practices over time. That’s why the kitchen was clean before breakfast and was clean again afterward. I have my process: Dishes, counters, dining room table, then floors. And, like most people, I have a preferred process for completing each task in this sequence (one never brushes the crumbs from the table to the floor).

There’s still a ways to go, but I’m improving. It’s no longer a surprise that the kitchen needs to be cleaned again. I no longer have resentment about it or resistance to it (most of the time).

The rest of the housework, from laundry to vacuuming to decluttering, is the same. If I let go of thinking of it as a project and recognize that I’m engaging in a practice, complete with a process designed to support my efforts.

We can extend this same thinking to other realms. Often, business owners spend thousands of dollars on websites that quickly get out of date and languish until the owner is ready to spend thousands of dollars again to update them.

That’s analogous to cleaning the kitchen only when you renovate it. In reality, updating a website is an ongoing process, and website owners should create a weekly or even daily practice of making changes to keep the online representation of their work in alignment with what they do.

I used to treat my bookkeeping like a project. I did it twice a year: once before tax time, and then right before the extension deadline because I was not able to complete it before tax time. I am much less stressed (and more profitable) now that I have built processes to foster a thrice-weekly practice of carrying out bookkeeping and CFO duties.

How do we make this shift from project to practice? What if we don’t have the processes in place to guide us?

We begin with establishing a practice, showing up at predetermined intervals whether we want to or not, whether we think we need to or not. From there, through doing the work, we figure out the processes that we need, refining them as we go until they are honed to perfection. As we do, our results improve, we’re less overwhelmed, and we might even look forward to the work a little bit.

If you’ve got a big, overwhelming project that’s been difficult to start or stick with, you might consider whether there is a way to turn it into an ongoing practice, even temporarily. You don’t know what to do next? Dedicate fifteen minutes a day just to staring off into space thinking about it. That’s a practice. See where it takes you.