care tasks are functional

i want you to stop caring for your home. You might think it’s

important to care for your home, but your home is an inanimate object—it’s building materials and paint. It might need maintenance, but it doesn’t deserve to be cared for. You are a person. You deserve to be cared for. I want your home to care for you. How do we do that? By focusing on function.

how to find the function

You can break down care tasks into three layers. At their foundation, care tasks have the basic function of keeping your body or space safe and healthy. This is represented by the bottom layer of the cupcake.

The icing on the cake, so to say, is things that increase your comfort. The cherry on top is just things that make you happy. When we understand what really matters to us in terms of safety, comfort, and happiness, we can begin to let go of others’ judgments of how our spaces must look. One person may be perfectly comfortable and

happy in a space that is significantly messier and less organized than another person.

The health and safety aspects of care tasks are pretty universal, but the comfort and happiness layers are unique to each individual.

For example, let’s take the care task of changing your sheets. It’s hygienic for everyone to remove dust, sweat, and dead skin cells from their bed. Many people would agree that it’s more comfortable not to have little bits of stuff tracked into the bed from feet or pets. But only

some people really identify that making their bed makes them happy. Lots of people could care less.2

It’s easier to tolerate the repetitive nature of care tasks if we let go of moral messages and isolate the functional reason for doing them.

The idea that “I’ll just have to do this again tomorrow” can be

exhausting and de-motivating. Yet most of us never think, “Why

bother eating? I’m just going to be hungry again in a few hours.” We understand that eating is functional. We need to give our bodies calories and nutrients so we can go about making a joyful life.

Try writing down your various care tasks and isolating the functional reason for doing each of them. Take the task of sweeping our floors. A moral view might say, “A dirty floor is disgusting. A floor should be clean. Real adults keep their floors clean.” Notice all the value statements and the perfectionistic, all or nothing view. Also

notice that in order to fulfill this value standard the floor must be clean at all times. Instead, challenge yourself to find a functional reason to clean the floors. For me, I do not like the feeling of little bits of stuff sticking to the bottom of my feet. That bothers me. When

there are things cluttering the floor, I often trip. Those are two great functional reasons for me to pick up and sweep my floor. I still may

not do this every day, or even often if I am really struggling. But with a functional rather than moral view, my brain may go, “Let’s sweep a path from the bedroom to the kitchen because I deserve to walk that path without tripping or getting dirt on my feet.” All of a sudden, the

task isn’t about measuring up but instead about caring for self.

Let’s try this exercise with our kitchen counter. A moral message I may have is “a good wife keeps her kitchen clean.” This will cause me to either stress out unless the whole kitchen is spotless or be so

overwhelmed with the idea that I must clean the whole kitchen that I feel paralyzed and do nothing. Either way I am exhausted. When I ask myself what makes my kitchen function for me I can begin to identify concrete needs such as having enough clean dishes for the day, enough clear counter space to prepare food safely, access to my sink and a stove burner, and an empty trash can. Suddenly all that is really required fits on a short, finite list. I can do a few things to feel like I have cared for my needs. Then move on. If I have the time and energy to continue on and clean the whole kitchen, great! But if not, I can

move on without guilt. Now my space is serving me and not the other way around.

what is quickest is not always what’s functional

If I had a dollar for every time I have been told to “clean as you go” or “just don’t put it down; put it away,” I would solve my care task

problems because I would be a bazillionaire and would hire people to do everything for me. Alas, those habits have never worked for me.

I understand why people offer this advice. It does make sense on paper that putting something away right after you use it or cleaning up a mess right after you make it is the quickest way to maintain a tidy home. But the quickest way to do something may not be the

most functional way for every person. I once spent a whole day trying to clean as I go and by the end I was stressed, exhausted, and yelling at everyone. Oh, and my house wasn’t even that clean.

Trying to clean up every mess as it’s made fractures my attention span and makes me feel frazzled. The concentration it takes to keep track of every item I use and return it to its home immediately makes it difficult to enjoy the moment. To top it all off, my young children are fast as lightning and their needs are often immediate.

Cleaning up the breakfast mess may only take ten minutes, but in that time my oldest has taken her pajamas off on the kitchen floor, pulled out a box of LEGOs, and fallen and scraped her knee. Cleaning up breakfast, picking up floor pj’s, tidying LEGOs, and getting a Band- Aid cannot physically happen all at once. Just as I get done kissing boo-boos and putting clothes on the oldest, the youngest has asked for more milk and shat her pants. The list of things that needs to be cleaned simply grows faster than any one person can move. Not to mention I must get these children out the door in the next five minutes or we won’t have time to go to the park before nap time.

Even when I’m by myself, I tend to wander excitedly from project to project without quite wrapping up the former one before beginning

the next. This isn’t a flaw. I like spending my day this way. It’s fun and enjoyable for me. It does make for a bigger mess at the end of the

day, but the answer isn’t to force myself into a clean-as-you-go habit that doesn’t work for my brain. The solution is to develop achievable and even rewarding strategies for tackling a larger end of day reset. That’s what works for me and it’s just as valid as the choice of those who prefer to clean as they go.

At the end of the day I typically have a big pile of dirty dishes. I’ve been known to spend ten minutes organizing them on the countertop before loading them into the dishwasher. People almost always

scratch their head and say, “You know the right way to do dishes would have been faster that what you just did.” And they aren’t wrong.

It is, technically speaking, faster to load dishes directly from the sink into the dishwasher or, better yet, directly from using them into the

dishwasher throughout the day. But sometimes the “right” way of doing something creates barriers for certain executive functioning skills. Sometimes the simple reason is that the right way is not

enjoyable and so it gets procrastinated. For a lot of people, finding a method that bypasses the most executive functioning barriers or

that makes a task a little less intolerable is better than what’s

“quickest.” In the end, the approach that you are motivated to do and enjoy doing is the most “efficient,” because you are actually doing it and not avoiding it.

‌See the appendix for more examples.