On a macro scale, the saying holds true “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” On a household scale, I’d argue you can replace “death and taxes” with “laundry and dishes.” Unless you’re Jack Reacher.
With a family of five, three of which are young kids, we have a lot of this to deal with. We use fifteen plates per day (minimum), fifteen spoons and forks, at least seven various cups, and then all of the glass storage containers, bowls, serving dishes, and cooking items associated with preparing and storing food. Our dishwasher gets run at least once per day, and we hand wash most of the equipment used to cook our food. There is a large section of our countertop dedicated to placing all of the hand-washed items and the massive amount of kids plastic cups, plates, spoons, forks and bowls that never seem to get dry. It has never been fully empty in five years.
Each of the kids wears at least one outfit per day, usually two or three for the baby, plus pajamas. My wife and I also have regular clothes and gym clothes that we usually burn through daily. Then there’s towels, bedding, dog blankets, etc. All of which piles up in no less than seven laundry baskets around the house.
The dishes are a lost cause for now, unless we want to switch to paper plates and plastic cups, which I’m not willing to do. We could also free up counter space by hand drying everything, although that would only lead to more time spent on dishes. In the case of the dishes, I’m temporarily defeated.
Ten days ago as I was doing the third load of laundry of my otherwise pleasant Sunday it dawned on me that there are seven laundry baskets in my house. For various reasons, my wife and I had felt it was easiest to let all seven of them continually fill to the point of overflowing before spending one to two days of our weekend running the washer and dryer from sun up to sun down and then folding and storing all of that laundry. Jack Reacher just throws his clothes away after he’s worn them for all of these reasons.
Still, seven laundry baskets, seven days in the week. I work in the basement where we keep the washer and dryer. I’m reading Atomic Habits. What if I could make a habit of bringing one load of wash downstairs with me every day of the week? It took less than a week to build the habit. It took only seven days to see the results.
<Takes out megaphone> MY WIFE WAS JUST TELLING A NEIGHBOR HOW BRILLIANT AND SIMPLE MY IDEA WAS! And it really is, but the brilliance is the simplicity. By simply making the act of running a load of laundry a daily habit (usually done in the morning before the kids kick our asses), laundry is no longer a concern at all. It’s almost disappeared from our day. It takes me minimal time to carry it up and down the stairs and run the washer and dryer, and it takes my wife a few minutes to fold it.
I’m writing about this here on my blog about financial independence because it’s a great example of how a small change, an optimization of something I was already doing, has had such a profound impact in a short period of time. Has there been any change in the amount of laundry my family produces each week? Not at all. But by consistently running just one load of wash a day, spending maybe a combined 15 minutes of our day each day, we saved one to two whole days of running the wash, trying to fold everything while entertaining the kids, complaining that it was the umpteenth time I was carrying a load of wash up the stairs, etc.
Now about those damn dishes…
Freed by 50 