Date Posted: February 19th, 2010
For the past few weeks, this has been my morning routine.
6:30 AM: Alarm goes off.
6:30:01 AM: Kitty starts meowing because he either wants food or attention. It’s hard to tell which.
6:31 AM: Take my temperature. (Aaron and I use Fertility Awareness as birth control, so…)
6:35 AM: Get out of bed. Go downstairs to the kitchen to feed the cat.
6:37 AM: Almost trip down the stairs because of kitty.
6:40 AM: Actually feed cat. Look toward the basement and think about how good it will feel to use the exercise bike.
6:41 AM: Grab a glass of water and a book.
6:45 AM: Go downstairs and use exercise bike.
With this routine I can, with minimum resistance, accomplish two goals: get out of bed at 6:30AM and use the exercise bike daily. The reason this routine works is that my environment is well aligned with my goals.
Kitty acts as a cute, pitiful sounding alarm clock that sits outside the bedroom door and can’t be turned off unless I both get up and feed him. This is a huge incentive to complete the first goal: get out of bed at 6:30AM.
The location of the exercise bike helps me complete the second goal. It’s in the basement, and the stairs to the basement are in the kitchen. The kitchen is where I feed kitty, so the exercise bike is only down one flight of stairs. It’s easier to go there than it is to go back to bed.
Change these two things and the chances that I complete my goals drastically goes down.
If I fed kitty in the evening instead of in the morning he probably wouldn’t bother us at 6:30 AM, meaning I wouldn’t have my incentive to get up early in the morning. On the off chance that he did still bother us, that wouldn’t give me much incentive either. There’d be no specific task for me to do. He’d just be wanting attention. I don’t need to go downstairs to give him attention. Also attention is active. I can’t use the exercise bike while kitty’s wanting to be petted and played with. Feeding kitty in the morning is well aligned with my goals. Feeding him in the evening is not.
If the exercise bike was in one of the spare bedrooms (a legitimate place to put it) it’d be much harder to get me to use it. I’d no longer be choosing between an upward and downward stair-climb. The warm bed would be just as close as the bike. It’d be difficult to choose the bike.
Action for You! If there’s some goal you’d like to achieve, ask yourself if there’s any way you can rearrange your environment to make it easier for you to achieve it.
Chances are the first time you make a change it won’t work for very long. That’s OK. Just try something else until you find an arrangement that works for you. Eventually you will, and doing the things you want to do will be easy.
Tags:
Organization, Physical Health, Self-Discipline, Subconscious.
Posted at
7:00 am | No Comments »
Date Posted: November 2nd, 2009
For my graduation present, Aaron got me a Roomba. Specifically a Model 530 Roomba. Let me tell you, in spite of it being a cleaning appliance, it is the coolest present I’ve gotten in a while. Our house is now the most vacuumed house of anyone I know, and it’s all thanks our Roomba, Sven.
If you google at all you’ll find plenty of reviews about what Roomba can and can’t do, so I’m not going to repeat them here. Instead I’ll tell you about some indirect benefits of having a Roomba do the vacuuming and some tip or two about how to keep it in good working order.
Good Thing 1: No Clutter on the Floor
Sven can’t clean under the pile of dirty clothes on the floor. In fact he’ll get stuck in them.
This was the main reason I wanted to get a Roomba: I wanted a strong incentive to keep my clutter off of the floor. For the most part it’s worked. At the very least I’m quicker now to put away whatever it is that’s on the ground, since I’d like to let Sven be able to vacuum all the rooms.
Of course, the way around this is to pile your clutter on couches…
Good Thing 2: No Crumbs in the Kitchen
We cook a lot. And with cooking comes food prep detritus landing on the floor. Before Sven we’d sweep the floor after washing the dishes. I used to dread doing it. Now we can just put Sven in the kitchen and let him do his thing. It’s not perfect, but it goes a long way toward making our kitchen a more pleasant place to work.
Tip: How to Clean Your Roomba
The one downside with the Roomba is that it has to be cleaned fairly often, and unlike other vacuum cleaners the process has multiple steps. You have to empty out the bin and then clean off the brushes. If you have long hair the brushes will have hair wrapped around it. Both Aaron and I have long hair so we’ve experienced this firsthand.
Roomba’s fairly easy to clean except for the beater brush. For whatever reason, the part that gets lots of hair caught in it is a solid piece of plastic that can’t be removed. At least not easily. There’s no tool that comes with it either.
To clean out that roller we use a pair of Toenail clippers kinda like these. They aren’t perfect, since they don’t quite fit inside the clogged area, but they do a pretty good job. With enough patience I can usually remove all of the hair stuck in there.
Final Thoughts
Will the Roomba solve all of your clutter problems? No. You have to really want to not have clutter first. Roomba can only act as a final push to get you to keep it off. Also, I’d say you have to already be pretty enamored with the idea of Roomba doing the vacuuming for you. If you don’t think Roomba is the coolest thing ever, I imagine it’s affect on your life will reflect that.
Was it worth it for me? Absolutely. Will it be worth it for you? You’ll have to answer that yourself.
Tags:
Organization, Recommended Stuff, Self-Discipline.
Posted at
3:17 pm | No Comments »
