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Notes -
Feeling that today.
Its a combination of the repetitiousness and the fact that if you slip behind a just a little bit, the difficulty of the task seems to grow at a slightly exponential rate. Its manifestly unfair that if you don't devote X hours per week to keeping up, tasks will accumulate at the rate of X + Y², where Y is some variable representing the amount of additional complexity added by undone tasks feeding into each other.
I do have symptoms of ADD, but I assume "doing chores is boring" is the way every right-thinking person feels. I would prefer to be bored by boring things than to 'cope' by taking drugs that make you not care about the drudgery.
I'm not saying Mary Poppins lied to us but when I sit there folding/hanging up clothes that I know for a fact I'll be folding and hanging up again in about a week it doesn't feel like I'm building towards anything. Cleaning out gutters at least feels like I'm maintaining a system that will provide benefits down the line. Laundry in particular feels like a directly sisyphean task. And its also the one that is hardest to justify hiring someone else to perform. There's no special tools or skill needed, just time. I wish Elon Musk wasn't 70% hype and 30% delivery about most of his companys' products.
In contrast, mowing the lawn is one of the easiest to farm out to a specialist, but I actually enjoy it (4 times out of 5, anyway) because the act of wielding mechanical blades to beat back nature is pretty satisfying, and the act of pushing a mower isn't particularly stressful if I have an audiobook to listen to.
Finally, it is annoying to try to prioritize chores because there's several different metrics that have to be 'optimized.' There are chores you need to do in order to facilitate other chores, there are chores you do because it is necessary to keep a functional schedule/routine, and then there are chores that don't achieve much other than improve the aesthetics and comfort of your local environment. If you are running short on time, you can really only do the chores that are necessary, and those that are prerequisites to the necessary. But as the 'aesthetic' chores pile up, your general comfort level decreases which is particularly distressing, and hard to ignore.
And these can be combined in various ways. If I want to cook food for the week, I usually need to have clean dishes and utensils, which requires emptying the sink of all dirty dishes and running a load through the washer. Which sometimes requires manually soaking and scrubbing out pans and such. THEN I can make sure I have sustenance.
Hence why I am not surprised that tons of younger Millenials and Zoomers opt to doordash more often.
I want to clean my windows because I hate seeing streaks and stains but find it hard to justify bothering with that when the floor that I'm walking on is covered with light filth and dog hair, but oops turns out the vacuum cleaner filter needs to be changed and there's a clog to clear out, so maybe I'll just ignore that for another week and instead work on removing the rust spots on my bedframe, which is a completely aesthetic matter but not having to look at them will take a certain load off my mind.
Anyhow, last week work took up all my time and energy so I didn't complete a few daily tasks that I normally do during the week and its all coming due at once, so frustrated that the more time I put in at work the less time I have to keep my home in order, and have to come home to a reminder of my empire's slow decay every day. And I can spend some of the money from working longer to offload some of the chores if I wanted, but dammit the *WHOLE REASON * I worked extra was to take home more money to do or buy fun stuff (and pay down debt). Spending it on getting menial chores done is a betrayal of my past self.
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