It's not about just doing the dishes, it's about the sum of all the other chores and things you have to do. It's overwhelming in its entirety, not the individual tasks.
When they look at the washing up a procrastinator doesn't just see the washing up, they also see that they have to do a laundry, fix the cupboard creak, do a full clean of the cupboards, clean under the fridge, wash the floors, dust the cobwebs, fix the dripping tap, take out the recycling, decide what to do with those old jars, etc., etc.
Even if they do eventually manage to do a flurry of chores, and usually feel great, it's not a habit to do it again. It's not a scheduled minor, automatic, task. Your brain deals with habits much easier than things you have to consciously do.
So it inadvertently builds up, and BAM, as if from nowhere, there's a massive pile of washing up with a whole load of OTHER tasks mentally attached to it again.
You see it as easy and lazinness, but we don't. The irony is that living like this is actually a lot harder, you're having to ultimately put more work in for often worse results.
> When they look at the washing up a procrastinator doesn't just see the washing up, they also see that they have to do a laundry, fix the cupboard creak, do a full clean of the cupboards, clean under the fridge, wash the floors, dust the cobwebs, fix the dripping tap, take out the recycling, decide what to do with those old jars, etc., etc
This reminds me: is there a word to describe a related phenomenon, that I find incredibly frustrating? It goes as follows: say I want to take a one minute break to fetch myself some coffee. I go to the kitchen, find the dishwasher running and no clean cup, so I have to clean one myself. I do that, then discover I have to refill the water and the beans in the coffee machine. I make the coffee, and the machine flashes red. The dredgewater bin is full. I need to pour it out and clean it. I get dirty and coffee-smelly, so I want to wash my hands. Doing that, I use the last bit of soap in the dispenser, so now I have to fetch the 5L jug and carefully refill it. By this time, what started as a one-minute break turned into 10 minutes of chores, and I'm already anxious about getting back to work.
Some form of the story above happens to me pretty much every other day. Is there a name for this kind of unexpected recursive expansion of chores?
I don't know but I call it "the stack". If the stack gets big enough, it can get overwhelming.
Maybe it would make sense to have a todo list organized like a hierarchical bullet point list for things like these... where you don't have to store the whole dependency graph in your head. I find that that's often why I don't get the actual task intended complete; because in the process of emptying the stack, I forget what got me there in the first place.
My wife is like you, she sees everything she has to do as a huge "lump" of work and gets overwhelmed and distracted trying to make progress on everything at once. She's also ADHD which means she very easily gets distracted by something, which then leads to hyperfocus on that seemingly unproductive thing.
I see the kitchen and I think "this is going to make my back and legs hurt so much, I'm going to rest a bit before tackling it." Then I get distracted with reddit or HN or whatever, and suddenly it's the next morning and I have to work again.
I don’t mean it as an attack. I’m affected by the above too. Sometimes it’s because you look too far down the road as you allude to. But that could be part of an “excuse” mechanism.
Breaking things down into more discrete unconnected units allows addressing neater (less messy) problems/chores.
In myself I do notice over complicating things as an excuse to put them off and waste time. But as others suggest, sometimes you just have to power through and get things done.
And in most cases it’s not a hard or difficult work. The hard part is committing to doing it. Once you actually start it’s mostly a breeze.
Ah, ok, I've removed the first paragraph as I was being too defensive and it didn't really add anything.
I've been personally struggling with this for decades, I've found solutions that work for months, or even sometimes years and had long periods of effective productivity. But they all seem to eventually get forgotten and then don't work the 2nd time round.
It's very frustrating.
It's funny as I can easily work hard for other people and clients, etc.
When they look at the washing up a procrastinator doesn't just see the washing up, they also see that they have to do a laundry, fix the cupboard creak, do a full clean of the cupboards, clean under the fridge, wash the floors, dust the cobwebs, fix the dripping tap, take out the recycling, decide what to do with those old jars, etc., etc.
Even if they do eventually manage to do a flurry of chores, and usually feel great, it's not a habit to do it again. It's not a scheduled minor, automatic, task. Your brain deals with habits much easier than things you have to consciously do.
So it inadvertently builds up, and BAM, as if from nowhere, there's a massive pile of washing up with a whole load of OTHER tasks mentally attached to it again.
You see it as easy and lazinness, but we don't. The irony is that living like this is actually a lot harder, you're having to ultimately put more work in for often worse results.