Household routine quietly eats the energy and attention you need for the big things. On the "clean house syndrome" and why chores are worth handing off.
There’s a scene in The Social Network where the characters talk about fishing. The idea is this: on a fisherman’s wall you see a photo of him holding one enormous marlin. You never see the photo with twenty little fish. One very big fish — that’s what goes on the wall.
Yesterday I wrote about how important it is to let go of secondary things in time and keep your focus on the ones that really matter. Have a read if that’s where you are right now.
There’s another trap that drains a huge amount of energy and attention: everyday household routine.
A lot of people think there’s no escaping it. That’s not true.
Very often people actually could delegate the chores — they just don’t.
Maybe they don’t want a stranger in the house. Or they don’t want someone else looking after their child. Or they’d rather not overpay for prepared food when they could cook at home.
But if you don’t arrange your life so that routine stops taking the lion’s share of your energy, you simply won’t have the resource left to do anything big or significant.
Small, cheap busywork quietly takes the place of real growth and real progress.
People also develop what I’d call “clean house syndrome”: tiny tasks and questions scatter your attention until there’s nothing left for anything meaningful.
So I’m convinced that if we want to reach a new level in life, we have to learn to hand some of the household load to other people and make life simpler for ourselves.
Do you agree that it’s easy to get bogged down in chores and stall out without any real progress?