The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Hi, I'm your wife.
Well, not really, but you sound just like my husband. I don't assign him tasks because he's not my child, but I hate that I have to do most things myself.
Why don't you just do stuff when it needs to be done? It's very easy to say "It doesn't need to be done now; I'll get to it later." My father-in-law does this all the time also. But then these things never actually get done. As with the example of the plane tickets, the sooner you buy them the better, so you should do it as soon as your travel plans are finalized.
It seems you understand this and the real question is how to make yourself do things, but the only answer to that is to just do them. I'm very curious why this is a stumbling block. Do you think of tasks and just have other things you'd rather do? How important are those other things? Do you just forget about tasks (in which case you need to be ok with your wife reminding you)?
It's usually that I don't see any upside in doing it right away, and potential upside from delaying it.
A more convenient opportunity to do the thing may arise - a lull in conversation, an unexpected phone call, etc. Or, another task might come up and both could be combined for greater efficiency.
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This implies that it doesn't need to be done! That's why I didn't do it yet! I think the underlying problem is different intuition regarding when something needs to be done between @stolen_brawnze and his wife.
Not uniformly true. As the designated plane ticket buyer in my house, I absolutely wind up with better deals by waiting, sometimes. As someone that's also inclined towards procrastination, this can cause some real problems as I decide whether the prices are good enough. This amps up even further with sports or concert tickets on resale markets - will they go up or down over time? I'm guessing and trying to get a good deal, not just buying things as fast as I possibly can. Different preferences in certainty and completion would cause real relationship strain here, I imagine.
Yeah, the ticket thing is a real "it depends" situation, but generally good to get on it sooner and have a plan (I would love to see a post from you on how to decide when to buy).
Deciding what actually needs to get done is another tricky one, going back to the age-old conflict of people with different standards of cleanliness. I don't think I'm too much of a clean freak, but I do think that visible dirt and stains on the floor should be cleaned up. I am apparently alone in my household in thinking this, so I have to clean them up. It's very easy for family members/roommates to coast on the back of the person who is most bothered by dirt and clutter.
I suppose you could make an argument that dirt and clutter are not objectively bad, and I'm not sure I'd have a really great counter-argument at hand, but it's hard for me personally to live with it.
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