Advanced Task Juggling with Gamification
April 4, 2017 Leave a comment
This is a guest post by Ben Stallings (Becca’s brother), a Web developer and permaculture designer in Emporia, Kansas.
“In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and – snap! The job’s a game!” –Mary Poppins
I work from home, and my wife doesn’t, so I do most of the housework as well as home improvements and managing my own work schedule. My clients rarely have fixed deadlines, so it’s usually on me to find the motivation to do my work and stay on task. Friends who don’t work from home often tell me that they wouldn’t know how to “juggle” work tasks along with housework, or that they’ve tried and failed to do it, so I thought I’d share my method.
Where I’m coming from
But first, a little background. I was a die-hard workaholic in high school and through most of college. If I took a class, I wasn’t satisfied unless I got an A on every assignment. If I joined an extracurricular group, I attended every meeting, and I showed up on time or early, and I resented those who didn’t! Then, over spring break of my junior year of college, I visited a friend in a small city in Mexico, and during his workday we took a two-hour lunch break (from 2-4pm, the famed siesta). Noticing my anxiety at the slow pace of the meal, he explained: “In America you have the Protestant work ethic, which says to go to heaven you must work hard. In Mexico, we have the Catholic work ethic, which says to go to heaven you must live well.”
That conversation caused me to question my approach to school, and later to work and housework. It made me ask, Who am I doing this for? What are their expectations? What do I hope to get out of it? How might I meet everyone’s goals, working smarter instead of harder, and leave more time for “living well,” whatever that means?
I had a breakthrough when I stopped getting my satisfaction from completing tasks and started getting it from making progress toward my goals. In school, I stopped worrying about how I did on any particular test or project or class and instead looked ahead to how each task was getting me closer to my longer-term goals. After college, I took a part-time job that paid barely enough to survive on, cutting my living expenses to levels I can barely imagine now, so that I had ample time to explore the city and soak up everything it had to offer. I’ve followed a similar approach in my career ever since: I rarely bill more than 2 to 4 hours a day to clients, which is barely enough to pay the bills and stay mentally abreast of the work, because I have too many other things I want to do with my time!
On the home front, I’ve applied the same strategy to most of the home improvement tasks I’ve undertaken. Read more of this post
What’s wrong with conventional cleaning products?
Here’s our complete guide to cleaning a typical Earth dwelling. We’ve tried many environmentally-friendly products over the past 20 years and have found more good ones than duds. Here, we recommend some brand-name products that work especially well and some inexpensive basic materials that are great for various cleaning projects. Yes, it is possible to make more homemade cleaning products than we do. We’ve struck a balance between purchased and homemade products that works well with our cleaning habits and the amount of spare time we have. If you use an awesome homemade cleanser, feel free to share details or a link in the comments!
Photographs by Nicholas Efran
Other than soap, the only material needed for this project is a long, narrow mesh tube. It should be at least 12 inches long; 18 inches is better. You might happen to purchase some type of fruit or vegetable that comes in a mesh bag you can reuse. If not, the best source is a scrubby-puff, like these, which I found in a 3-pack for $1 at a local dollar store.
Of course, if you happen to have a used scrubby-puff that you don’t mind destroying, that’s even better for the environment than cutting up a new one. Each puff will provide enough mesh for 2 or more Soap Savers, depending on the size of the puff.
Autumn is here! Time for some nice baked squash! Unfortunately, this tasty side dish can really mess up your baking pan. Here’s how my nice Corningware pan looked after my most recent batch of butternut squash. For some reason, this particular squash had an unusually large amount of sugary juice that oozed out the sides and–especially in the areas that weren’t sheltered by the squash sections–burned into a blackened mess.
