What You'll Discover In This Episode:
Laundry. So much laundry. It’s just as inevitable as death and taxes. Whether you live alone or have a family of six residing under your roof, laundry is a necessary evil. Very few people actually enjoy doing laundry so it tends to be one of the chores people put on the backburner, until they run out of underwear in extreme cases. And really, picking up a hamper, dropping the clothes into the washing machine, adding detergent, and turning the thing on takes a mere minute. That’s the easy part.
Even switching the clothing to the dryer isn’t painstaking. No, the part we all hate and procrastinate on is putting away the clothes. That part often feels like too big of a task to conquer after a long, hard day of work and so we tend to let them sit in the dryer, even as the dryer turning them every so often reminds us that the clothes are still in there. Yes, we know. We just don’t want to deal with it.
I’m not about to fix your life-long lack of motivation to put your clothes away but I am about to make a point. If you laid the 4 D’s method over your clothes each time you did laundry, it could make putting them away less daunting of a task. Here’s the gist of how it works. For each item of clothing you pull out of the dryer, determine which action you should take between:
a) Delete It.
Hole in the sock? Dingy undershirt? Stain that can’t be removed? Toss it in the trash instead of wasting time folding it and putting it away.
b) Delegate It.
Spouse’s clothing they like hung a certain way? Son’s uniform that needs to go back into his sports bag? Mother-in-law’s intimates? Make piles and enlist the support of others to help you put away the clothes you so kindly washed for them.
c) Defer It.
If you are taking a load of your clothes out of the dryer and moving a different load of your clothes from the washer to the dryer, there is no reason to waste time opening all of your different drawers to put the first load of clothes away now. Instead, hold off for an hour and batch the two loads together, putting them away at the same time. Then, you only need to open all of those drawers and get the hangers out of your closet once.
d) Do It.
No excuses allowed. If the clothes must be put away by you and there’s no solid reason to put it off until later, buck up and do it now. The longer you put it off, the heavier the task of doing laundry will feel.
Is the system fool-proof? No. Can it be helpful in making laundry more manageable? Yes. Do I care that much about your ability to manage your laundry? No.
But… I want to share that the 4 D’s method I told an example for can be laid over many different areas of your life including your business. I lay the 4 D’s method over my task list all the time which makes managing and prioritizing my tasks feel simple and less daunting so I can stay focused on the activities that will help me achieve my goals. I’m confident the 4 D's Of Prioritizing Your Tasks & Projects can greatly benefit you greatly, too, so I dive into the method and how you can effectively apply it to your task list in this episode of Productivity Straight Talk.
