First, Do the Dishes

Being an adult is more about maintenance tasks than I ever would have thought. Brushing my teeth. Scheduling well child visits. Taking the car into the shop. Going to the dentist. Taking my computer in to get a broken part fixed. Folding laundry again. Vacuuming.

But especially, doing the dishes.

Because of all the house-related maintenance tasks, dishes is the where the household most quickly grinds to a halt when they don’t get done.

These graphs are somewhat tongue in cheek, and I admit I haven’t actually timed most of it. (The numbers for the first day are real though! It takes me about five minutes to unload the dishwasher at the beginning of the day, and about five minutes, whether over the course of the day or all at the end, to load it up again. Running it takes less than a minute.)

But, at least in my home, the overall shape of the graphs is right.

It’s easy for me to do the dishes when I’ve done them yesterday. I unload them in the morning, I try to put dirty dishes in there throughout the day, and I load any stray ones and run it at night.

If I didn’t run the dishwasher the previous day, it’s more complicated. Then, I usually load the dishes in the morning and run it, but now I can’t load dishes as they get dirty until the dishwasher is empty again. It takes a few hours to run, and even then the dishes are hot enough at first that I usually want to let them sit for a bit before I unload them.

It’s also more awkward to unload them when it’s not first thing in the morning, since I’m not used to it as part of my workflow. And as the counters and the sink get full, I find myself moving dishes around in order to get to what I need. And now a bunch of my favorite kitchen tools that I use every day, and a bunch of our favorite dishes are unavailable since they’re stuck in the dishwasher!

Or I could hand wash some of the dishes, of course, which avoids a bunch of those problems! But that also times time and effort, especially when the sink is already piled with dishes.

If I let the dishes build up even longer, all of our favorite, and second-favorite, and even third-favorite things get dirty, to the point where everything except the things we hardly ever use is dirty. Food gets caked on, so that it’s hard to hand wash, and the dishwasher probably won’t get it fully clean even on its strongest settings.

I don’t really want to go in the kitchen, since now all the piled up dishes are unpleasant to be around, and probably implicitly sending me the message that I’m behind on my life.

So all of that is why whenever I’m overwhelmed, or on days when I have very little energy (I’m considering the year of my life I have spent in the first trimester of pregnancy), I start with dishes.

And it’s a relief for me to already know that that’s my plan, since when I have the least slack is exactly the wrong time for me be reinventing the wheel.