Police your chores to improve your day

Whether we look at them as household chores or life admin, they are far from enjoyable, and the prospect of doing them can seem annoying, if we haven’t made peace with the fact that they are necessary

As a child, one of the big talking points in my friend circle in the building I lived in, was how we couldn’t wait to be adults. After all, the big choices were vested with the adults: how much TV they could watch, how late they could stay out, how no one could force them to eat vegetables they didn’t like. Adulthood was to be this golden time in my life, I decided, where I could do all things I absolutely loved, and avoid all those things that I didn’t like or struggled with, including Mathematics.

I clearly put adulthood on a pedestal and didn’t realize that adults have their own share of chores and tasks they dislike, and yet which can’t be avoided. So, when I finally stepped into adulthood, I felt overwhelmed and a bit cheated by the long list of tasks that needed to be done either on a daily or weekly basis,” writes Sonali Gupta. (StockPic)

I clearly put adulthood on a pedestal and didn’t realize that adults have their own share of chores and tasks they dislike, and yet which can’t be avoided. So, when I finally stepped into adulthood, I felt overwhelmed and a bit cheated by the long list of tasks that needed to be done either on a daily or weekly basis. Whether it was folding the clothes, cleaning the kitchen, ordering groceries, cleaning dishes, figuring what is to be cooked every day…the list of chores seemed endless. Our family even had a WhatsAp group called ‘Kya Khaana Hai’ to solve this perennial concern.

If you are an adult, I bet you have at least one of these tasks on your to-do list too, and you are figuring how you are going to make time for it. Our struggle with daily chores is a factor that unifies all of us in adulthood. Whether we look at them as household chores or life admin, they are far from enjoyable, and the prospect of doing them can seem annoying, if we haven’t made peace with the fact that they are necessary.

Both, millennials and Gen Z clients talk about this in therapy sessions and mention how these tasks don’t actually make it to their priority list and often they don’t even schedule time for them in their daily calendars. Gen-Z clients during sessions, openly address how social media, overall life, anxiety coupled with erratic working hours comes in the way of these tasks and wonder if there are any pointers to managing them. I do sympathise for these tasks don’t offer any immediate gratification to us and don’t seem like optimization of our time. As a result, many of us are likely to delay and procrastinate leading to what American writer Anne Helen Peterson describes as ‘errand paralysis’.

However, each of us does find a way around this, though it’s hard to pin it to a specific age where people end up making sense of what works for them in relation to chores. I have come to realize that chores require conscious and mindful attention. I have understood that if I don’t like something, but only I can do it, then it’s best to consciously schedule time otherwise I’m at the risk of never doing it or postponing till the time there is no excuse left.

If I’m terrible at something and dislike it, I have finally acknowledged, that either I spend time to learn and get better at it or ask for help and see if someone else can do it or take responsibility for it. This year, I told my husband that figuring what meals to cook every day stresses me out, and he offered, ‘Let me make weekly menus.’ This, reader, was one of the highlights of my year. I know it sounds exaggerated, but isn’t adulthood about little moments like this, which make our life so much easier?

Allow yourself the choice to ask for help, delegate and then outsource where possible. On hard days, where it feels like you need a break from these chores, take a pause and remind yourself that you can commit to re-commit. That, is the real superpower that comes with adulthood.