When Your Mom Is Right, Afterall - Kitchen Math & Dishes

I understand it's a tad too early in the morning (when this goes live, anyway) for math, but bear with me a minute.

You see, doing the dishes is as simple as basic math. 
For my example cooked dinner, you're using one pan, one spatula, a cheese grater, a knife, and a plate, to cook with...and then two plates to eat with. That's seven things to wash.
Those seven things to wash will always be what you have to wash, no matter when you do it - be it right after dinner, or the next day, or the day after that (or so on and so forth).
However, if you do not do them that day, and instead wait until the next day, you will have those seven dishes, plus the dishes for that day to wash (we'll say seven again, for sanity's sake). If you do the dishes the second day, it's still fourteen things to wash, seven from each day.

It's still seven things to wash each day. But you can do them the day they get dirty, or save them up and do them in a chunk.
Saving them doesn't mean you're saving yourself any work, you're just making it a large chunk of work later.
Doing them each day means it takes less than five minutes, for example. Saving them up, for say three days, means it takes fifteen minutes. Same amount of time over all, just depending on when you want to put the time in.

But you know what?
It's so much easier to do it once a day, instead of saving them up.
Because when the pots and pans are still kind of warm from having been cooked in, they're much easier to wash. Things that I used to have to soak no longer need that...because they're still warm on their own, and nothing is stuck on from having sat for a day (or two...or three...).

It's math.
And not everyone likes math. But it's the good kind of math that makes sense (and doesn't have any letters in it, which is apparently a huge complaint for maths).

For the past, well, a little over a month, really, I've done the dishes every night after dinner. Which, for me, is an insane thing to say. But it's totally true.
And it's much easier that way, it really is.

I will admit, that the days we ate pizza or hamburgers for dinner, I didn't do the dishes (as, ya know, I hadn't cooked, so there was nothing to wash). But, the next days, I got right back in and did it - whereas, normally, I would miss a day with something and just say "eh, not today, either" the next day...and then it'd be a week before I even thought of it again.

Really, it's a huge accomplishment.
Is that weird? It's probably weird.
But I also know what I'm capable of and what I tend to do, and this falls into the "huge accomplishment" pile (which is rather small, really).
It's on my to-do list every day, and it's getting checked off every day, Not much else has that kind of track record, a month in a row.

And especially considering how difficult February was for me, it's an even bigger accomplishment.
It was nice, though, that even if I did nothing else on a day, if I cooked dinner and did the dishes, I had gotten something done. And that made a huge difference. I wasn't a complete failure, something had gotten done.
So that's kinda cool, right? I think it's pretty cool.
And I also find it very hopeful. That maybe, just maybe, there can be other habits built in, to just be defaults at some point. I'm working on that right now, with doing something on Duolingo and Memrise the past month as well (but, I haven't breached the full month mark yet, but I'm a day away!).
So, soon, I will have two habits that I do, every day no matter what. And I will have two things that I can say I accomplished even if I did nothing else, or even if I felt like junk (or worse than junk).

But right now, I'm enjoying, oddly, doing the dishes and having them done.
The sink isn't clean (though it is at least mostly wiped out right now)...the stove isn't clean...there is clean clothes in the dryer, and I need to vacuum. But my sink is empty.
That's kinda cool.

~Havok