How do you psych yourself up for chores you hate?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I used to have a set schedule and it worked fine for me …

Get up, go pee, brush teeth and get ready for the day.
Grab all the laundry out of the hampers, take them into teh kitchen and start washing. WHile in the kitchen, get breakfast. Sit and swill coffee/eat breakfast and watch half an hour of tv.
After breakfast, move first load of laundry into the dryer start second. Clean up the kitchen putting away the dishes from the washer from the night before and loading teh breakfast dishes in the washer.

Go watch another half hour of tv, swill some coffee.

Vacuum the living room and bedrooms

Go watch another half hour of tv, swill some coffee and make and eat lunch.

Take clothes out of dryer, and put in new loads all around. Take laundry into living room and fluff and fold while watching tv, and waiting for the last of the laundry to finish. Put the laundry away and get dinner started.

While dinner is going, head into the bathroom, clean the bathroom then finish up by grabbing a nice shower and changing onto clean clothes.

I know it sounds really stepford, but when you are not working and only have an apartement to clean, between that and it really being preinternet [this was the 80s] you do what you can=)

If I wasnt a gimp, and really unable to do a lot of anything Id probably consider doing something like this again =) I have to admit, I am a proponent of teh slow food movement, Nothing quite as nice as home made bread, and long slow dishes like beef bourguinon, pot au feu or corned beef=)

22

Housecleaning has changed for me since I retired. I used to do a general pickup every night and then cram a flurry of cleaning and laundry into a few hours on the weekend. I’m a neat freak so it was never all that messy to start with and my partner limits his disastrous mess to his den and workshops. Now I wander around the house and if I see something that needs to be done I have plenty of time to do it right then and it never builds up to a lot of cleaning or laundry at once. Cooking has too and I make much more interesting dishes that take longer than I would have had time for when I was working.

23

I’m a sicko in that I’ve come to enjoy “chore days” as long as my husband isn’t home. If he’s home, the tv’s going, and I get distracted, plus he’ll say crap like “what’s for lunch?” right in the middle of me cleaning the kitchen or something.

But the chores I least like, well, I just don’t think about 'em. I have a pattern: I start in the kitchen, work in there until it’s done. Go to the dining room, work in there until done. Then I do the living room, guest bathroom, master bed/bathroom in that order, working loads of laundry in as I go. I don’t usually deviate from this pattern unless the master bath/bedroom is so bad I have to make myself go backwards to be sure it gets done. That way, I don’t get to skip a chore I don’t like, because it’s part of whatever room I’m working in.

I also make sure to take breaks in there, too. Usually after kitchen/dining/living, I break, then go finish the rest.

24

The only thing that works for me is doing it by way of procrastinating on something I hate still more.

25

I-pod…motown…full volume…

Done before you stop belting out “Ain’t too proud to beg…”

26

That cracked me up. I cleaned to Motown last week. I started with some Talking Heads but I was exhausting myself and going too fast to do a good job.

27

My husband does that, too. My answer to that is “That all depends on what you’re making!”

28

A couple of ways. One, music helps a great deal!
Two, kitchen timer. If it’s a chore I’m really dreading, I’ll set a kitchen timer for 10 minutes, and promise myself I’ll just do it until the timer goes off. By the time that happens, I’ve usually accomplished way more than I thought I would! So, if it’s still not ‘done’, I just take a break (again with timer) and go back and do another 10 minutes later.

I’ve even been able to engage my youngest (9YO) into helping, with the use of a timer. “We’re just going to pick up in the living room for five minutes”, I’ll say. “In that five minutes, each of us will pick up as much as we can”. We have a small living room, so 10 minutes of man-power can make a huge difference!

The third trick I employ is to tell myself I’m just going to pick up/put away a certain number of things from the space that needs the most attention. My dining room table tends to get used as a desk/office space/etc so when it gets overwhelming, I’ll tell myself “I’ll just deal with 20 things off the table, then I’ll stop”. If I do that several times over the course of the day, the table looks much better!

29

I listen to music. I can’t listen to music without doing something else, so doing chores fills that void.

Plus, I make all my chores as easy as possible to do. Cleaning any room takes less than 5 minutes for me with the way I have things set up.

30

I prevent myself from doing something I want to do until the chore is done.

Music helps a lot.

Also, if there’s a lot to do, alternating between work and leisure helps. An hour of work, and hour of leisure, etc.

31

That’s cute. Pretty good tool for a family.

32

I’m a believer in (short) lists*, too - I make a mental list in the morning of what I feel I ought to accomplish today, and once I’ve got my list of chores done, the rest of the day is mine to enjoy. Today’s list was go to the dentist, get groceries, drop off a bit of cardboard recycling, and go to library. Done, done, done, and done. :slight_smile:

  • I stay VERY realistic with these lists - usually two or three big chores only.

ETA: As Nike so wisely put it, too, JUST DO IT. Things don’t get easier by putting them off; they just weigh on you until you’re sick of them.

33

This. While I don’t invite people over much, I do clean like crazy before them, and in between I do some chores every so often – I don’t do top to bottom cleaning every time. For example, I might vaccuum one day, then do the bathroom another day, etc.

34

I sort of do this. I put a DVD on the computer. I start watching and then pause to do a chore and then return and watch a little more then pause, rinse and repeat. So I get to watch my shows and get the chores done.

I would never be able to just do them all in one fail swoop.

35

Another good little ‘mind trick’ is to realise that usually, the only ‘hard’ part is actually starting. I often remind myself that how I feel now (before I’ve started) and how I’ll feel once I have actually begun the task are two different things. Once I’ve started, I enjoy the sense of making progress, getting something done and doing it well.

I also do some things that others have mentioned. Whenever practical, I treat the task as a chance to enjoy lots of favourite ‘feel good’ music. I also use the reasoning that no matter what I feel about starting the chore now, I’m not going to feel any better about it tomorrow or the day after - by which time, the need will probably be greater and the work harder.

36

My partner did the greatest thing for me last night. He ran a wire from my computer through the wall into the kitchen and mounted a second monitor for me. Now I can read recipes without running back and forth or printing them out and still be able to see whatever it was I was watching before I started cooking or cleaning in there. Because it’s just the monitor I’m not tempted to touch it with food all over my hands. Kitchen chores just got less tedious.

37

I like to watch something that I’ve DVR’d on while doing chores. If it’s something that I really want to see or a show that I really enjoy I can feel like I’m rewarding myself while working. And washing dishes or folding laundry is mindless enough that I can follow a plot while doing it.

I’ve also become a big proponent of the Just Do It method as well. My husband tends to overthink chores and it makes him think that they’re going to take forever. Well, they do seem that way if you spend four hours thinking about something that’s going to take 10 minutes. You could have been done hours ago!

Like DianaG said, it’s easier to relax and much more satisfying if the chores aren’t hanging over your head. Most of them won’t take anywhere near as long as you think. If you haven’t let dishes pile up for a week, it only takes 10-15 minutes to do them. Cleaning a bathroom (if you don’t have to really scrub the tub), takes ~15 minutes. It’s much better to just jump in and do them and then get to relax with the satisfaction of knowing they’re done then to try to relax with them hanging over your head.