In Dave Ramsey's book Total Money Makeover, he teaches how to stack your debts by paying off the debt with the lowest balance first while paying minimum payments on the rest, then after that balance is gone, adding what you would have paid for it onto the next lowest balance. I have pondered his advice to pay off the lowest balance first rather than the highest interest rate. It seems like you would be done paying it all off faster if you weren't accruing so much interest along the way. It is a psychology trick, not a mathematics trick. It's about motivation. Once you have paid off the smallest balance, the easiest one to do in the shortest amount of time, you get a psychology reward that makes you feel like you can keep doing it and not relapse into bad spending habits. It seems to me he is making some assumptions about uniformity of human nature, and I do not personally agree that this solution is one-size-fits-all, but I can certainly see some validity to his point.
I take his debt stacking solution and now apply to cleaning the house. Lets say your whole house is a disaster--worst case scenario. Dishes piled to the ceiling, trash bags spilling over, hampers filled and dirty laundry trails in every room, black rings in the toilet, toys and books everywhere except where they belong, crumbs and sticky spots under the table, leftovers growing mold in the fridge... Need I go on? How do you go about tackling a job like this? Realistically it isn't all going to happen in one day if you have to work alone. I say pick the smallest and easiest job to do first. Maybe it's the guest bathroom. Just swab the toilet, wipe off the counter, and change the hand towel. Voila! One whole room clean. Doesn't that feel great? Progress. Now the next smallest job. Or you could do a little bit in each room, whatever catches your attention, but at the end of the day, you'll probably be left feeling like you didn't get anything done. Tomorrow the work will feel more like a drag. That's kinda like paying a little extra on all your different debts at different times. That's the least likely method to bring success. Or choose the biggest job with the most interest... That's probably dishes. Gross. If you don't take care of those soon, you'll have bugs in the house and a smell that won't go away. And you'll have stains in the sink... This task will take a long time, and you may need to take a break in the middle when the dishwasher or drainer is full. So you've put in a good amount of effort that doesn't pay off immediately. This job is going to take all you've got to keep going. Just plow through.
At times I feel like I'm running in a hamster wheel. Run run run run run and get nowhere. There are always more dishes, more dirty clothes, more crumbs on the floor... So I imagine that my hamster wheel is hooked up to a power generator, and I'm pumping energy into my family. That helps.
I see that I have only had 7 people look at my blog so far, but I'm curious, how do you manage your housework? Not just in worst case scenario, but generally, how do you stay motivated to work? Leave a comment.
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