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Task Magic: The Power of a Made Bed

…the “exigency” of the alarm clock,

its power to influence my behavior,

is bestowed on it by me precisely

in the act of getting up.

- Steven Crowell

My four favorite words are “You were right, Mom.” I don’t hear them often, but when I do they fill me with juvenile glee for I am a petty, petty person. But, oddly, I have an extremely hard time saying that phrase to myself when my internal maternal figure is correct about an important aspect of my life. And one of the hardest grownup truths for me to accept from my wiser self is this: there is enchantment to be had in doing the chores of life.

She calls it task magic.

I know my inner mom is right about this because I have experienced it uncountable times. And while I realize that she is urging me to remember the construct of task magic so that I can routinely harvest that lovely feeling of satisfaction at chore’s end – for some reason I just don’t trust her enough to keep current on my chore chart. As a result, a task that would take me fifteen minutes to do and bring me an emotional lift commonly gets put off for days, leaving me in the interim feeling idiotically lazy. In truth, I often spend more energy avoiding tasks than it would take to simply do them. Not impressive behavior at all.

I know this never happens to you, but if it happens to a friend of yours and you’d like to learn more about it, feel free to look over my shoulder as I work to discover why task procrastination is so hard for me to avoid.

So, Jan, this article’s for you. (Warning: This article is rated MLA – for mature audiences due to adult language!)

It’s real

Task magic is real. It is created when a soupçon of positive biochemistry squirts through our brain as a reward for doing something that orders our life. I would imagine that we humans selected for this tendency because tidiness probably meant safety way back in the day. An orderly life would mean fewer places for venomous snakes to hide, less chance of getting food poisoning and better odds of finding your weapon at a moment’s notice. It’s gratifying to know that our brains continue to reward us for ordering our environment. You could say that order is the first stop on the route to stress management.

Humans also have an affirming biochemical reaction to aesthetics because Mother Nature has taught us to appreciate beauty. The Golden Ratio, that mathematical equation underlying much natural beauty such as the branching of trees and the spiral of a seashell, is one example of the artistic skill of the biological world. Humans come to associate beauty with good health, meaning we are happier and calmer when surrounded by loveliness. Tasks that improve our aesthetic environment, therefore, will precipitate that happy juice our brains love so much.

Then there’s delayed-release task magic. We get to enjoy a dose of that when our efforts from the past pay off today. The shade tree you planted years ago and under which you now sit to read the paper, the checks in your mailbox from last week’s statements, or a coveted campsite you reserved months earlier are all examples of this. If you disengage from the world, you stop planting the seeds of Task Magic DR. If this continues too long, there will be days and days without the particular kind of joy we get when we experience tangible benefits of our earlier labors. A well-balanced life, therefore, will have regular bulb-planting activities scheduled.

Tasks are generally well within our wheelhouse, meaning that we are masterful in their implementation. (No one could have been raised by WWII-generation parents without learning the art of a bed made with hospital corners to coin-bouncing standards.) As a result, doing chores allows us to experience small instants of potency during our day that can offer us a moment-long break from the ongoing challenges of our chaotic lives.

Tasks usually involve movement and we are beings who are designed to move. There is an abundance of biochemistry that rewards movement, from heady endorphins to the subtler GABA. A steady brain diet of these internally released chemicals leaves us with a prevailing positive mood.

There is also the statistical joy of chores…that wonderful sense of crossing things off a list. With each line through an item, our burden gets lessened, at least temporarily. And we may even get to the point when our current list is over halfway done. We then get to coast to the finish line of Get Shit Done Day and buy a round of drinks for everyone.

Task magic is a curry of endogenous drugs that spices up what would otherwise be the bland administration of our daily lives. Put another way, task magic puts your brain in a good mood. Let’s hear it for happy brain juicing!

Why doing chores is hard

Clearly our brain is well designed to teach us self-discipline around chores with its reliable offering of task magic. So why are we unwilling at times to accept the offer?

It is tempting to self-vilify when we let administrative tasks slide. But, as I discussed in the article on procrastination, it is wiser to be curious about what is standing between you and the obviously mature choice to get on with your chores. Following are some examples of obstacles that can legitimately interfere with our imbibing task magic.

Foremost is this: the vast majority of our life’s chores do not stay done. The food that needs to be prepared, the windows that need to be washed and the bills that need to get paid are just a fraction of the extensive and noncumulative duties that keep our lives running smoothly. That truth creates a Sisyphean situation that we tend to, quite legitimately, resent. Now, few of us can garner the aplomb that Camus attributed to Sisyphus in this quote: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” But all of us can understand that there is great dignity to be had in resolve. If we reframe the futility of noncumulative chores as an accrual of a dignified existence, we can see peeling yet another potato as a noble endeavor. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that chores vivify our existence.

As long as we’re wandering through mythical times, let’s consider the next obstacle Herculean. There are just always a thousand chores to do. No matter how many you do, the tyrannical To-Do list will always fill back up to an even thousand. Since we all have task-saturated lives, we must develop the skill of task triage. If we cannot, we will feel pressure from every job, no matter how distal it may be to our level of contentment. Because there is different press to the need to renew our passport, recaulk the shower in the guest bath and turn off the sprinklers, a big part of our relationship to chorehood is learning how to procrastinate effectively. If you think about it existentially (is there any other way to think?), what you wrestle with every day is how to spend yourself. As a near-death experience will highlight, few of us pay much attention to this truth. Nor do any of us get any training on how to make an ontologically intentional to-do list. Can we get better at spending ourselves wisely by starting with a more thoughtful process for and attention to the act of charting our chores for the day? If not, we are at risk for developing chore phobia – that very unproductive position of feeling so overwhelmed by the very idea of chores that we cannot engage our self-discipline at all. Melancholy tends to follow closely on the heels of chore phobia.

A related obstacle occurs when we accustom ourselves to a high level of chorehood and then fail to realize that sometimes our depletion is legitimate. When our get up and go is gone by noon, it makes sense to review how much of our day has already been spent on chores.

Which brings us to willpower depletion. My dad was prone to repeating this saying: A task begun is half done. Neurologically speaking he was right. Depending on its degree of difficulty, every chore has a certain threshold energy – the amount of willpower needed to get the chore started. Once our willpower has initiated the chore, it’s usually fairly straightforward to work to completion. Some chores – those that are new or difficult or made up of multiple steps – will have a higher proportion of energy required to initiate them. When facing a chore, then, we are looking at the hurdle of its initiation. If you want the results but cannot initiate the task, you are out of willpower. Your inner hurdler has bonked. There is little you can do about this until the well of initiation energy fills back up. You might, however, have just enough energy to read the article on willpower to prepare you to meet tomorrow's to-do list with more competence.

And, next up, will to power. If your days consist entirely of or even predominantly of noncumulative chores, you are trying to run your whole life off the little starter motor of willpower. This is unsustainable. You have to spend at least some part of every day engaging your will to power. For when you do engage this most human part of yourself, you will be on the yellow brick road toward mastery. Time spent on that road may deplete you physically but it will definitely fulfill you existentially. But if you do not travel the road toward the mastery of your personal collection of gifts, your life will be indistinguishable from that of a slave. Your life will not be your own for it will be in thrall to a maintenance existence. There will be no peak experiences, no thrill of sustained effort toward something meaningful to you, and no flow of profound concentration. Without the long-term dreams that are created by our will to power, we will be unable to create our unique essence. Absent the pursuit of our dreams providing us with a reason to get up in the morning, our chore-clogged life will be met with the legitimate internal question: “Why bother?” Another word for the state precipitated by this obstacle is depression.

There are other intoxicants that are more beguiling than the endogenous chemicals of task magic. A martini can present your brain with a lovely sense of relaxation similar to what we feel after the stalls are mucked, and it can do so without your having to lift a pitchfork. If it’s true that alcohol is easier and more reliable (as are all intoxications such as eating, reading, daydreaming or video games), how do we counteract this understandable reasoning? It’s the secondary biochemistry that is the kicker. When we muck the stalls, we get the immediate task magic. We also get the residual serenity of having engaged in a “doing” behavior. This is a more subtle biochemistry and must be intentionally harvested. You have to stand in the stall door, lean on your pitchfork and breathe in the satisfaction of completion. And, like breathing, it can be repeated as necessary. A wise woman fills her lungs again and again with the serenity of doing, a marvelous happy juice unavailable from intoxicants.

Another of my dad’s favorite sayings was: A job worth doing is a job worth doing well. This truism reflects the pressure of perfectionism that increases the threshold energy needed to initiate a task. I experience this every time I get ready to water my garden. I know that I can never irrigate my yard anywhere near as well as a thorough rain. I also know that I am at risk of over-watering some plants if I really soak things. So I understand that this is never a job I can do well. But do it I must. It always takes me an extra push to get to the task.

Fate will sometimes derail task magic. If we are approaching a task that has been ruined too many times by something beyond our control, we will be that much less willing to initiate it. If you are halfway through hanging your laundry on the clothesline and it starts to rain – again – you may find it a little harder next time to get around to doing laundry. Or you may struggle to get on with paying the bills when you frequently run out of money before you run out of bills. You can’t fight Fate, but you can fight the tendency to abdicate. Resilient people are those who remain hopeful that next time things will go better for them while at the same time they gently collect a little extra willpower for those annoyingly difficult chores.

Finally, there are chores that are harder to face because they have multiple initiation thresholds. Sometimes this is due to the fact that there are several chores that have to be accomplished before the main chore. It is harder to make a cherry pie for the neighborhood potluck when you have to go pick the cherries and also clean up the kitchen before you can start the baking. There are also chores that require plugging through a multi-day commitment. Getting your taxes done can take several monotonous days of data crunching. With each step of the chore and with each break in the action, new initiation energy outlay will be required to activate the next step. Unfortunately, there is little task magic to be had with half-done taxes.

Because self-command – that nonnegotiable existential skill – can be greatly strengthened or weakened depending on our relationship with getting our chores done, I want to add a sidebar here reiterating the importance of staying on task.

An ode to tasks

Tasks are kind of like money. Having them done, like having some serious coin in your pocket, makes a happy life very happy and a sad life a little less sad. The mechanism by which this happens – in the case of both chores and financial wherewithal – is comfort. Comfort follows when we get a first class ticket to the next leg of our life journey. We have the freedom to stretch our legs, someone else handles our luggage for a bit and we often get the cheery attention of others. To rein in my metaphor a bit, task-completion comfort is a moment of ease that can refresh us and reset our resolve. When you complete the last two steps leading off the deck in your backyard, for example, you replace the burden lump in your brain (I’ve got to get those steps finished. I hope I can do it well. What tools do I need?) with peaceful accomplishment status (Phew! That’s done. Don’t they look nice? They’re even level!!) Few of us get enough of this state, hence the intense gravitational pull of all forms of intoxication. All this is to say that one of the best ways to keep a steady hand on your comfort-seeking behavior is to try to keep up with your duties. If you can remember to see a tidy room as a mental health insurance policy because it is an aesthetic oasis in a stressful life, it can be a tiny bit easier to get on with your housecleaning tasks.

Having your chores done is also a testament to your care for your future self. When you come home after work and the crock pot has filled the house with the aroma of your delicious homemade chili, you can thank your weekend self for going grocery shopping and your morning self for caring enough about your after-work self to get up 30 minutes early to make that comfort possible.

The final stanza in the ode to tasks is this: when your jobs are done and your errands have been run, your environment is optimized for comfort which means that the quantity time of your life passes more peacefully while you watch for those delightful quality moments. (This sitch is what makes being a grandparent so special – you generally have your chores done and can sit so patiently waiting for the little darlings to do something wonderful.)

An ode to sternness

There’s a concept in the field of psychology that differentiates between authoritarian and authoritative styles of parenting. Both styles exert overt control over the child but the authoritative parents do so while remaining extremely responsive to the child’s individual needs. Sometimes we need to be authoritative toward ourselves, and by that I mean sometimes we need to make some reasonable but strict demands. For me this firm parenting style shows up in phrases I need to hear such as “Just sit down and do it!” and the sister phrase “Just get up and do it!” Because I was lucky enough to be raised by authoritative parents, the immature side of my psyche responds well to these commands when the adult side of me has taken my measure and believes it’s time to enact a little self-discipline. We each need to remember that a full presence of mind generates a healthy self-loyalty by creating a balance between self-gratification and self-command. I think that last sentence could be a motto on an existential embroidery sampler.

Tips and tricks

So what’s the difference between figuring out the legitimate obstacles blocking our daily dose of task magic and seeking excuses for not tackling our chore chart? That’s a good question. In my mind, when we sincerely investigate why we are struggling in life and our attitude is a kind one, we should get to a genuine “of course” state that will counteract the historical shame we have been feeling about our struggles. In other words, when we have ourselves better placed in our existential context, we should be able to respect our ongoing challenges. But once that gentle “of course” has released us from the additional burden of shame, we need to face the necessary burden of chores. Here are a few tips that can help us do that. (There are also some ideas about avoiding excessive procrastination here.)

My mom used to put on a stack of 78s and we would all get to work. I now have many days of music on my tiny iPod, enough to fuel a month’s worth of chores. Music helps with chores because, as I said, chores usually involve movement and music makes us want to move. So, a great way to get a task done is to get on your feet, swayin’ to the music…la, la, la.

My mom also used to make up elaborate chore charts. Unfortunately, they were so elaborate they became too much of a chore for her to maintain! But the idea was a good one. There are several ways to routinize tasks. You can make every Monday water-the-houseplants day, you can start every day with the pomp and circumstance of a To-Do-List ceremony or you can pile things up for a rousing Get Shit Done Day once a week. What makes or breaks your strategy is how well it fits your personality. And you also have to watch how you make up the list of things that need to get done. If you fail to triage well, you will not be able to trust your routines to keep your life running smoothly. If too many things make it onto the list, you will lose momentum. If too few, your life will start to fray around the edges. BTW, there is no sin in writing things on your list that are newly finished just for the joy of crossing them off! The internet is full of creative ways to make to-do lists fun, from nifty schedule books and gorgeous colored pens to crowd sourcing support for an onerous task.

Talk to yourself deliberately. Use the voice of support and the voice of expectation to address the chore challenges facing you. What I am talking about here is pairing the reassuring phrase “of course” described above with the call-to-action phrase that follows the word “and.” Examples might be: Of course you don’t want to bundle up, leave your nice warm den and go clear out the gutters. And, it needs to get done before it rains this weekend. Of course you’re hesitant to call to schedule your mammogram, and what’s it going to be like if you keep putting it off? If you can feel equally understood and confronted by your internal dialogue, you will up your chances of getting your shit done every day.

As I mentioned in the section above, it is very important to remember to harvest both the task magic and the secondary biochemistry of serenity. It is wise, not self-indulgent, to come around repeatedly to observe the completed task. Breathe in the scent of your air-dried laundry, revel in the beauty of your clean refrigerator and remind yourself to be proud of your consistent gym attendance.

To expand on that last tip, there is glory in task accumulation that we need to learn to recognize in order to glean it. The process goes like this: The slow accumulation of days well lived is honorable. Accumulated honor leads to peace of mind, which is a marvelous antidote to stress. Lowered stress results in more energy to stay ahead of our chores and you can see how that leads back to honor. Glory be.

I’m not above tricking myself into doing chores. If the housecleaning has been ignored too long, I’ll invite someone over for dinner. (It invariably makes me crabby, but the house gets cleaned.) If I delay returning emails, I take my computer to a coffee shop and put my seat bones in the chair. And this trick always works with me…I just tell myself to put the laundry into the washing machine and not worry about what comes next. Apparently I don’t mind hanging the laundry, but I really resist making the commitment to doing laundry. Weird, huh?

Another trick that works quite well for my type of mind is making a One Item List. When I feel a lack of motivation that has continued for a few days, I ask myself to put just one thing on my list each day with the reminder that, at week’s end, I’ll have seven things accomplished. This strategy feels very calming to me since I’m prone to Task Phobia. Having grown up in a DIY family, I routinely overburden myself with jobs that are at the edge of my ability, patience and budget. A free-standing, One Item List protects me from having to acknowledge all the jobs that are out there waiting for me to gather sufficient resources to face them.

I also give myself rewards when I step toward a chore. When I take the time to make a To Do list, I feel that I’ve earned an orange-cranberry scone.

I’m getting better at besting two of the obstacles…the multi-step and multi-day dilemmas. I can now, sometimes, agree to just put the first step of a task in place, like getting the watering can and plant food out of the cupboard in the garage and putting them on the kitchen counter. And I can now, sometimes, enjoy the accumulation of partial completion when I remind myself that it is an enlightened stance. I still prefer the full-on rampage of a Get Shit Done Day, but slow and steady is increasingly appealing as I practice it more.

Where I tend to get stuck when it comes to getting on with chores is in lethargy. Given the choice, I’d rather sit and read than do just about anything. A morning ritual that involves coffee and newspapers creates a problematic energy requirement for me – creating the necessity to both get myself up and to give up something that I love doing (reading) for doing chores. The take away here is don’t sit down if there is a chore that needs to be done with some urgency. Stay on your feet and away from the reading materials, Jan.

Disgrumbled existentialist

This is probably a good place to admit that the existential truth about task magic can really irk me. Embarrassingly frequently I sit in the morning with full knowledge of how to make my afternoon sing (get through my to-do list for example) and I simply refuse to mobilize my morning self to make my afternoon self happy. Instead I sit and stew about how unfair it all is. I don’t want it to be true that one of the surest routes to peace of mind is a checked-off list. I don’t want to submit to the reality that undone chores will nag at my soul and deplete my energy. In fact, sometimes I just get in a squalor-wallowing mood. But, since I also have no interest in living in the Garden of Eden, I think I have a catch-22 on my hands.

How does one go about getting over feeling disgrumbled about the relentlessness of the noncumulative chores that can – when completed – precipitate task magic? With a country song twang, how do we overcome being tired of being tired of doing the tasks of life?

First, as you would imagine, watch for shame around this extremely human tendency to be dissatisfied with reality. In every aspect of life, the human brain is absolutely capable of seeing to the edge of the big picture but absolutely no further. We can never, ever understand why we are here and what all this is for. This total uncertainty pertains to the drudgery of chores just as it does to the vast and baffling universe. So, please be kind to your brain that understands that it has to do its homework but isn’t capable of explaining how homework fits into cosmic meaning.

Second, if you can beguile yourself with the understanding that facing a list of errands is actually providing you with a proven route to energy, you can remember to bookmark some of your precious willpower and save it for the process of overcoming the initiation threshold of getting started. In other words, try to jump into to-do mode early in the day before your resolve runs out.

Third, practice displacing your satisfaction away from the Fate-driven process of acquiring task magic itself and onto the ongoing self-esteem that results from the more-often-than-not reliability of our will to power. If we understand that, although we cannot prove that what we are doing with our lives is the best thing, we have to keep moving toward the essence we have chosen to pursue. Our ability to meet this larger existential challenge is greatly enhanced when we are at peace with how we are basically administering our daily lives. So, pull out the big guns, will to power, when you need to up your existential energy on Get Shit Done Day.

Now, I realize that I’ve just given you three more chores to do. So let me end this section with a sympathetic endorsement of the occasional enjoyment of a Don’t Do A Thing Day! Sometimes it’s liberating to be able to tell yourself: Just don’t do it!

Fallacious thinking

And then there’s the one-more-day-won’t-matter fallacy. Like a warm quilt, this explanation we offer in defense of our procrastination or petulance is so easy to slide under. But I’m sure you can spot the miscalculation in this excuse. While day one won’t matter – or even day two or three – day four probably will. But, because our immature side is over-concerned with the urgent near now, we can often trick ourselves into forgetting to do the addition. In this way day one through four can pass us by artificially disconnected from the summation of reality. We pretend that every day is day one. Lo and behold, day five arrives and our crookneck squash is beyond salvaging.

Happily, the same three strategies described in the disgrumbled section apply well here. Don’t shame yourself for trying to avoid the math of truth; remember to budget your willpower for perishable chores; and engage your will to power to deliver your good behavior.

Conclusion

If we consistently avoid chores, we are making the confession to ourselves that we are not up to the task of being an ordered human. Since few of us would intentionally choose to be disordered, we ought to work to eliminate those obstacles that block us from tackling tasks before we succumb to the idea that we are incapable of doing otherwise.

This is a struggle for me as I am easily seduced away from chores. But my goal is to get my brain more and more under my command. It behaves itself best when it knows I’m on its side and when it knows what’s coming at it. So, I work on petulance, procrastination and my resistance to task magic. Maybe someday I’ll be able to relax my vigilance and trust that I will get all gold stars on my chore chart. But until then, to paraphrase Don Quixote: Fate may confuse the outcome, but the effort remains sublime.

Here’s to Get Shit Done Day!