Summary - Motivation for the demotivating little task
It’s spring cleaning today in my house. And I must say that even though I’m cleaning the house on the go daily, when it’s time for spring cleaning, there are always a lot of things to do. It can be very demotivating to see so many things to do when you are already doing so much cleaning it on the go.
The amazing thing is these things to do are just small tasks that you can do immediately like putting away newspaper for recycling, or wiping up the dust on the furniture, or arranging the DVDs. Little things that somehow there’s so many of them, you just feel very very demotivated.
I don’t know about you but I find these techniques to be quite effective especially for motivating us to do all the tedious small tasks.
1) 100 Items And You’re Done
Whenever you are picking up socks or taking out the garbage. Count and shout the number of task you have done. An example -
You are picking up socks, shout “ONE!”
Then straight away do the garbage and shout “TWO!”
The rule is you must not stop unless you have done 100. I’m getting excited even writing about it 
2) The Amazing Race “Insert Your House Here”
Cleaning the house is not a one time thing. You will be doing it for the rest of your life. Why not make it a race. Create a list of things to do and do all the thing on the list (duh!). But you will have to time how long it takes you to finish the list. For example you take 3 hours this week. Next week try to do the same task in 2.5 hours. If you break that record, make a big deal out of it. Go out at a fancy restaurant with your loved ones to celebrate.
I wouldn’t tell her what’s the occasion though.
3) Soundtrack Yourself
Burn a cd of songs that you really like. Play it while you’re cleaning. You can sing to it, you can even dance to it, but promise yourself that there will be no repeat for the playlist. When it’s over, it’s over. So motivate yourself by saying that if you can’t finish by the time the songs are over, you will have to do the work without any music.
Hopefully the fear of boredom will help clear the area a bit faster.
4) Attack The Giant First
Just like in war, we need constant motivation through out the war. In this war for cleanliness, it is recommended that you do the bigger thing first. For example, moving the heavy furniture. Do this first and the rest will feel like the easiest thing to do.
5) In-Law’s Visitting Scenario
This is actually my favorite. I noticed that I can clean the house faster and better when I keep convincing myself that my in-laws are coming. I notice this when they actually came to my house a few months ago. My house never looked cleaner.
6) The One-Minute Rule
This rule is actually proposed by Gretchen from The Happiness Project. According to the rule, anything that you can do in one minute time, should be done immediately. No question asked. For example, you come back after work and you see an umbrella misplaced. You can of course choose to ignore it and do other thing. But if you are applying the one minute rule, you will pick up the umbrella and put it to its rightful place. Why? Because it will only take you less than a minute to do that.
- I wonder -
Any other ideas on how to motivate ourselves doing those tedious little tasks?
———– Personal Note ———–
Now that we have a new member of the family, our daughter Zafirah. The mrs and I have come up with an agreement that one of us will have to look after Zafirah at any time. I’m telling you. A lot of my existing schedule were thrown out the window
But I’m more than happy to do that just to see her smile. Did I tell you that she is now smiling
Photo credit - Givepeasachance
