gentle skill building: doing the dishes

i am going to talk about dishes now. Here are the ground rules:

If you have cried over dishes in the past seven days—go buy paper plates.

 

If your dishes have been in the sink for months—throw them away.

 

If you are wanting to tackle the pile of dishes—read on.

 

step one: preparation

 

Eat something sweet. Get that blood sugar up and find a great song to put on. Get yourself a cute apron and a pair of dishwashing gloves.

 

 

step two: organization

 

Take your dishes out of the sink and stack them into categories: big utensils, little utensils, bowls, plates, cups, big bulky dishes, pots and pans, et cetera. Getting them organized helps because:

You can often see there are not as many dishes as you thought.

 

The act of organizing is usually rewarding to most brains. This subtle step helps keep motivation going.

 

This usually takes five minutes and it clears your sink. If you get through those five minutes and decide you’re done then

 

although you still have dirty dishes, you now have a clean sink, and a clean sink is functional. It would be perfectly acceptable to wash straight out of the sink without sorting first, and you can still give yourself permission to stop after five minutes.

However, then you still have dirty dishes and no clear sink. So I find the sorting to be a more functional approach.

step three: wash or load

 

Hand washers can then wash by category, giving themselves permission to stop after each category. Dishwasher owners load up their dishwasher by category. If you have a dishwasher, remember

there is no rule saying you must unload it all at once. It’s perfectly fine to unload a category at a time when you feel you can manage it.

hacking my dishes: the dirty-dish rack

 

I’ve made small functional upgrades in my dish routine, one at a time. I decided that the first step would be to move from leaving dishes out all over the house to taking them to the sink. It was quick, which was important when I was postpartum with a newborn and a

two-year-old bouncing off the walls, and it ensured that dishes

weren’t left around the house too long to collect mold or bacteria.

I enjoyed this functional upgrade for months. Then I went on medication for postpartum depression and got more capacity. From there I decided to start loading those sink dishes into the dishwasher every night at 7:00 pm and run it. Some days I managed to unload it first; others I simply shoved the dirty dishes in with the clean ones and ran it all again. Sometimes even that was a stretch and on those days I aimed for simply putting the milk cups my kids needed in the dishwasher.

One day while perusing IKEA I saw a dish rack and was hit with a moment of functional genius. The barrier to doing dishes was the feeling of being overwhelmed when I looked at the pile. If I were to place the dirty dishes into the dish rack as I used them, my sink would be empty and accessible and the dirty dishes would be

organized, which greatly cut down on the feeling of being overwhelmed when it came time to load them up into the

dishwasher. I even bought myself a second silverware basket to sit on the counter so I could fill it up all day and swap it with the clean basket from the washer at night. Now I have my very own little dirty- dish station. It’s unconventional, but it works for me!