Order of Precedence

No matter who you are, your work load probably looks a lot like my workload, which looks a bunch like anyone else's workload. We all have obligations and demands on our time. If you participate in society, you still have to do taxes and wash your clothes. Same as everyone else. If you don't do the first one, the laundry you'll end up doing will be orange prison jumpsuits. And this is all assuming you aren't working with chemicals that will melt your sneakers - as I was in the photo below.

If you work for a living, or at something you love, like say writing, you're eventually going to face tight deadlines. Life happens. Unexpected events wreak havoc with even the most ironclad of intentions. Having a routine in place works in your favor. Well exercised self-discipline helps, too.

But if there's one law of the universe, it's this: The more unflappable you believe your system to be, the more crap the universe will throw at you to prove you're wrong.

When that happens, you need a plan to rely on when you're hyperventilating into a paper bag because your book is due tomorrow, the taxes were due yesterday, the kids are screaming, and your sartorial options are 'do laundry' and 'go naked'.

Allow me to introduce you to a short term triage system I use called: 'Order of Precedence.' This is designed to be used when you still have all your regular chores to do, but life has handed you an insanely short deadline, three crises on the day job, and phone call from the school nurse saying your kid just broke a bone. Maybe three. If you go to the ER now, you might beat the ambulance.

Order of Precedence goes like this:

1. Living things first - do the minimum amount of work required to keep life in the living things in your home. At my house, this step is broken down even further: People first, critters second, plants third. Yes. The plants totally count. (What? They clean the air and provide O2.)

2. Order of law - do that which will keep you out of jail. Taxes, licensing vehicles, providing enough clothing that no one gets sent up on indecent exposure charges. To me - that means laundry. To some people I know - it means a quick trip to a store for packages of new undies and socks. Presto. Legal and clean. Ish. Again, you're looking for minimum effort to achieve your end.

3. Recruit help - all is fair in love and war here. You're in crisis. Doesn't matter why. If you live alone, yet the dog MUST go to the vet while you're killing yourself to get that novel about the gunslinging cowboy vampire to your editor by midnight - phone a friend. Swear you'll return the favor somehow AFTER you've met deadline. Understand this might find you helping that friend move. Pick friends who don't have collections of antique refrigerators. The serious aspect of this is consider hiring someone in to clean the house once a week. Or once every other week. It's not forever. It's until the storm has passed. Grocery delivery fits here, too.

4. Forget everything else. So the floor crunches when you walk on it. You'll remedy that. After deadline. Your kids are heard muttering that they're sick of McDonalds? Does your family think you've forgotten the way to the kitchen? So what. You'll fix that after deadline.

The point of this system is to make it through any kind of crunch mode. Even kids understand crunch time, since just about everyone leaves a report to the night before it's due at some point. The system is useful as a last ditch coping mechanism, but that whole minimum effort thing, while freeing up lots of time for meeting deadlines isn't designed for long term use. Minimum effort begins to translate to the other people in your life as: we're not important enough for more than your minimum effort.

And that, my friend is a message you don't want to send. Unless you really, really mean it.

How to Balance Chores and Deadlines

This photo really is apropos of this week's topic. I tweeted it after I managed to duck out Friday afternoon and get a mani/pedi. Frivolous, perhaps, but I'm headed to my college reunion this week and the RT Booklovers Convention two weeks after that - this is long-term prep.

All part of balancing my Things to Do and keeping all those balls in the air.

This week's topic is "Division of Labor: Who does what when deadlines loom." I know that several of our Word Whores live alone, so I imagine their posts will be along the lines of "WHAT freaking division of labor??" It is one of the great advantages of living with someone else - being able to share the load of the whole food and shelter thing.

For me, though, the deadlines don't really change much about how we handle stuff. I think that's because David and I have been together long enough (22 years) that we have a pretty good rhythm worked out between us. One of the reasons we harmonize so well is that we both value having a peaceful home.

This may sound like a no brainer, but it's a different value than many people have. Our house is usually silent - no TVs, no music - and we're often both working quietly on our projects. Neither of us likes drama. We rarely fight, we try to handle crises with as much grace and efficiency as possible. We had plenty of drama when the kids were teenagers; now, between the two of us, we keep things smooth and even.

We've traded some chore responsibilities back and forth over the years, but at this point he handles the meal-planning and cooking. We go to the grocery store once a week together and otherwise he handles additional shopping needs. He maintains the cars and household repairs. I clean, do dishes and laundry and handle the finances. This works really well for us and matches our personal rhythms. I don't mind spending the day cleaning house and doing laundry, but I really hate to have to stop working on something multiple times a day just to fix a freaking meal.

But this balance doesn't really change when a deadline is looming. My whole objective to dealing with book deadlines is to keep my progress steady and even. A few times I've told David I need to crunch and plan to spend an entire weekend writing - which he's always good about giving me room for - so that might mean the dishes pile up. I get to them eventually, though, and he never complains. When he was in school and had a big exam coming up, sometimes I offered to cook dinner. I'll do that, too, when he's not feeling good. I'm also still a better cook than he is :D so me offering to prepare a special meal is a treat.

Likewise, if I'm hustling to get out of town to fly somewhere, he'll often pop out to put gas in the car for me, clean the windshields and check the fluids. That kind of caring for me means more than flowers and chocolates ever will - though I like those, too.

I'm blessed to have the supportive and peaceful home life that I do. I remind myself of that when he TALKS to me at exactly the wrong moment.

Balance in all things.

Chores: Desire vs Fear

by KAK 

When I was wee, I had The Chore Chart. It was divided into Things I Had To Do, Things I Ought To Do, and Things I Could Do for Extra Money. Each category had a different monetary value and I was paid monthly for each check on the Chore Chart. It worked well until my teenage years when I lost my cohort in domesticity (she went to college, nothing too tragic...for her).

My first year of college involved a roommate. She was tidy until the advents of pot and her jock boyfriend. After that, I didn't do roommates...until I acquired a Long-term Roommate. Four things determined our division of labors:

1. Knowledge of How to Complete the Task
2. Physical Ability to Complete the Task
3. Level of Desire to Have the Task Completed
4. Fear of Result Should Other Complete the Task

When we started co-habitation, he believed I met requirements #1-3 to do his laundry. A load of his favorite shirts and a large bottle of bleach later, he discovered I had #2, but he was unsure if my failing was in #1 or #3. #4 became his greatest determining factor. He wisely decided his stash of muscle-car shirts was not worth risking and hence for did his own damn laundry.

Conversely, it took me months to realize that boys are to bed-making as cats are to baths. I still don't understand why, but I accepted his utter lack of #3 was increasing my #3. That roommate moved-on many years ago, leaving behind a wealth of knowledge about which tasks I have a bit of the OCD and which tasks I do without thinking.

My current roommate and I are still bickering over how kibble belongs in a bowl not strewn about the floor.

Men's Work and Women's Work

by Jeffe Kennedy

Back when I was a graduate student, lo these many moons ago, I attended the Neuroscience Convention in St. Louis. There I met another gal of my same age, doing very similar work, and we quickly bonded.

She'd recently married another graduate student and they'd started up their own household. She was at her wits' end, she confided, with the easy familiarity of instant friendship, about the chores. Before they married, she and her husband had shared a communal home with ten other people. People took turns making meals for the entire house. Chores were scheduled out. It had been a great situation, with everyone pitching in, equally.

Then she and her longtime boyfriend married and moved out of the communal house. Though both of them continued with demanding PhD programs, suddenly all chores were hers alone. All the cooking. All the cleaning. All the laundry. When she drew up schedules, like the ones they'd lived with happily for years, he became angry with her.

"He keeps saying I'm his wife," she told me. "I'm completely baffled."

She was considering divorce. Or annulment.

I didn't have much advice to give her except that I think the concepts of "what husbands do" and "what wives do" are so deeply ingrained in us, that they drive us subconsciously. What could be negotiated with a girlfriend, partner or live-in companion goes out the window when she becomes a "wife."

Both genders do this, applying expectations on the other, usually cobbled together from childhood examples, good or bad.

For me, I tend to fall in the camp that the person who cares most about the thing takes responsibility for getting it done. Having a clean, neat house matters more to me than it does to David, so I do most of the cleaning. He cares about having regular meals (I'm a terrible meal-skipper), so he does the grocery-shopping and cooking. I do laundry and he handles the cars. I handle the finances, mostly because he says I'm better at it.

We haven't always divided things out exactly this way. It's changed over our 21 years together - quite a lot from when the kids were younger and living with us. It's changed according to our work responsibilities, too.

Things change and we discuss rebalancing. I think this is also the key to our many harmonious years together. We can always work things out.

My instant friendship with that young woman didn't outlast the conference, though we made the requisite promises to stay in touch.

I wonder still how things worked out for her.