Laundry List

In the past couple of years, the utility company that services our region has begun regularly sending a report rating our energy usage. Without allowing us an opportunity to explain why we use more electricity than our neighbors do in the colder months—there is a good reason—they’ve made their comparisons and found us wanting. We’ve been declared not efficient.

Our consolation is the congratulatory letters we receive in the summer, when we are deemed highly efficient, relatively speaking. I’d love to bask in all that glory, but any efficiency we achieve then, at least in regard to energy usage, isn’t attributable to any grand plan on our part. It’s just that some of our neighbors are lucky enough to have central air, and we don’t.

Regardless, having generally been a conscientious student, with some unfortunate lapses here and there, I almost look forward to receiving these energy-company report cards. I get a little curious as I open the envelope: how did we do this time? And if not so well, how can we challenge ourselves to improve before next time? Simultaneously, though, the reports annoy me, and I resent them. Because here we are, hospitably allowing them the intimacy of access into our home, and wham, the first thing they do is judge us. Et tu, Brute?

Maybe I’m taking this too personally.

Clearly, though, they’re tapping into an aspect of my life, particularly my domestic life, that I grapple with: my own perceived inefficiency. Truth be told, the home-energy audit I could probably use isn’t to assess how much heat my old house is leaking but how much time and effort I waste on a daily basis. If only that could be fixed by insulating the attic.

Now, we’re all adults here, so it’s no big revelation to say that life as a grownup is inherently busy, and that there is always something a responsible person could or should be doing. Speaking for myself, if I’m not in the throes of a work deadline, I could go sort laundry. And once I’ve fed and walked our dog, it’s time to either pick up my son from sports practice or start dinner. Admittedly, sometimes I take a break and read a book or watch the TV show my son and I are obsessed with currently or go for a run or stare into space. But once I’ve finished a chapter or the episode is over or I’ve logged my miles or regained focus, the first floor can always use vacuuming, and it occurs to me that I can’t remember the last time the bookshelves were dusted, and I really have been meaning to get around to priming and painting the walls of the upstairs back hallway.

I’m doing my best here. But the long history of magazines and books, and the vast number of blogs and websites, focusing on ideals of household management and how to do this better or that in less time drive home that I am not the only person ever to consider that maybe day-to-day living can be approached more systematically than how I’m approaching it.

Although I can’t say I would have selected, for instance, the woman who lives next door as a point of reference, the utility company’s comparisons aren’t anything I haven’t already done to myself. But in their drive to effect greater efficiency, they ratchet up the peer pressure by pitting neighbor against neighbor—engaging, essentially, in institutionalized tattling. And they’ve made me realize that there is something truly insidious about the word efficient: when I hear it or read it, my brain sneakily inserts the word more in front of it, and in the subsequent determination of who, then, is less, I feel like I don’t always fare well.

Sometimes the comparisons I make take the form not of judgments but of information gathering. Since, if I know or meet or learn about someone who in my eyes or society’s is high functioning or very accomplished, I figure that person might understand something about achieving maximum efficiency in daily life. Or, to use a dog metaphor, that maybe they know how to walk their life instead of life walking them. If, for example, they have three small children, have recently earned a PhD, run a company, and grow and preserve their own vegetables, I’m interested to know when they fit in washing the kitchen floor. Because I’m looking at mine, and it’s got muddy bootprints all over it again.

I wonder how it is that those people—sometimes individuals, sometimes composites of successful others—manage to play King of the Mountain with their pile of undone tasks and come out on top. Or, how they have a clear line of sight to goals more ambitious than finishing the grocery shopping, whereas on some days I get a crick in my neck if I try to see past the mundane chores and errands that could do with being done.

Aside from fretting that there is an instruction manual for life that no one has bothered to share with me, I wonder if maybe part of the elusive secret is that not everyone cares if their house is frequently messy, or if it takes them an hour to cook a meal that the recipe swore upside down and sideways would be on the table in thirty minutes. Call me bourgeois, but I do care about this sort of thing. I think more clearly when the bathrooms are clean. The difficulty, though, is that if you’re hand scrubbing your kid’s socks before putting them in the washing machine, to give them half a chance of actually looking not-filthy at the end of the process, you’re probably not poised for total world domination.

And there, tagging along beside the comparisons, is the implication: if you’re not efficient, you’re not effective. And if you’re not effective, you’re not living your best life.

So I make my to-do lists, I engage in a flurry of cleaning and organizing, and, although in our household of three we do attempt to equitably share the workload, I propose schedules and divisions of labor to make daily chores take up a smaller proportion of our time, or at least my time. Because in order to manage to get to the things we would much rather be doing, we have to make sure the things that need doing are dealt with. To reference a sentiment expressed in the 1970s novel The Women’s Room, you can argue about who’s supposed to do the dishes, “but at the end, there are always the damned dishes.” Never mind that we should check if our dishwasher actually works, because then the dishwasher could do them.

The messages I’m receiving from society at large regarding how to go about the normal tasks of domestic life so as not to be consumed by them are often less than helpful. Quite recently, I saw an advertisement for a health-insurance company declaring that life should be easy. I gritted my teeth. A few years ago, a good friend of mine gave me a copy of actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook called It’s All Easy. Terrific, Gwyneth, thanks for the heads-up. And social media postings that I occasionally scroll through, which most people carefully curate to include only life’s high points, also leave me inclined to keep my concerns to myself.

When I was in my late twenties and my husband and I were establishing our household, I already had an inkling that there might be gaps in my knowledge of Life 101. In my honest desire to grasp what I suspected I didn’t, and because I was convinced that other people had information I wasn’t privy to, I would ask friends and acquaintances what I’m fairly certain they found to be odd questions. When they left a room, did they turn off the lights every time, or did they leave them on, to make their home homier? How much did they spend on groceries every week? What time did they go to sleep at night and get up in the morning? Did they eat out or cook? Did they prefer to pay with cash or with credit?

Decades into adulthood, I still take note of how others go about things.

I have a friend who shared that she shops for groceries almost every day, on her way to and from other places she has to go anyway. It’s quick that way, and she doesn’t have to think too hard about it. On the other hand, I, or we, tend to do one big grocery shop per week, which takes a while but at least it’s confined to a single day. I’ve thought for a long time that this works better for us. But recently as my son kept staring into the open refrigerator, hoping some food would appear, and later, as I hoisted one bag after another from my car and spent what seemed like a disproportionate chunk of my afternoon trying to squeeze too many items into our too-small pantry, as well as a whole lot of fresh produce into a refrigerator not capacious enough to handle it, I doubted our strategy.

Another friend once told me how she tracked her expenses meticulously. Being a Virgo, and thus a closet accountant, albeit one who lacks an aptitude for math, I’ve made my own attempts at wrangling our personal finances into submission. But my budgets have tended to fall apart whenever our houses have or our shoes do. Or I’ve simply tucked the budget documents in folders, notebooks, or desk drawers and forgotten about them, rediscovering them only when I make the time to purge old paperwork.

Other people I know have cultivated the habit of rising early in the morning and keeping to a rigid routine throughout their day. As much as I would love to adhere to that myself, I tend to be a little more desultory in my ways. It’s not that I don’t make plans, but I have to lick my finger and check the wind first. And my good intentions are waylaid right at the start of the day, when my alarm goes off and my hand betrays me by reaching out to silence it before I roll over for just a little more sleep. Some other bird can have the worm. I’ll just grab coffee.

I guess that’s a quick glimpse, from a distance, of what efficient looks like to me: a well-stocked fridge, well-managed finances, and an optimized schedule. What has to be added to that list, though, is arguably the most critical component of a well-run life: labor savings.

When I was digging up drainage stone from an old path in our front yard and shoveling it into a wheelbarrow so I could use it for a new path in our backyard, which I thought was very thrifty of me, until the fifth load or so, when I began to question what the heck I was doing, a neighbor came by expressly for the purpose of telling me, “You know there are machines for that, right?” Good to know. Even better to know that neighbors are available to kick you when you’re down.

I can’t speak for elsewhere in the world, but here in the twenty-first-century United States, we do collectively have available to us a whole lot of products, devices, and services that save us labor. Meal subscriptions. Dishwashers. Disposable disinfecting wipes. Hired cleaning crews. Personal vehicles. Power saws. Leaf blowers. Pressure washers. Vacuuming robots. Remote-control electronic thermostats. Dog walkers. Nannies. Synced calendars with reminders. Cell-phone contact lists. Grocery delivery services. Online shopping.

If I say all those nouns and adjectives fast enough, the sound they make is of someone working smarter, not harder. Or of someone cheating at the game of life. My take on that varies depending on my present frame of mind.   

My own everyday experience looks and sounds a bit different, slowed down somewhat as it is by verbs, which are more labor-intensive. Because in addition to shoveling drainage stone (which, by the way, I was doing at night, by the light of the streetlamp), I can be found stoking the fire in our outmoded nineteenth-century woodstove, penciling in updates to my calendar, washing the dishes by hand, walking the dog, raking leaves, moving space heaters from room to room as needed, staying home with the kid, wading through racks at a clothing store, driving to the supermarket, dilly-dallying, and browsing at the library before deciding on a book, or three, two of which will not actually get read.

A few more nouns would probably come in handy. When I look at the dog hair on our living room rug, for instance, it occurs to me that maybe a vacuuming robot would be nice after all.

Of course, I do in fact have my share of nouns: a cell phone to communicate with, a computer to work off of, a car to get around in, since our area has very limited public transportation. We have a house, and a large yard, so we own power tools, a lawn mower, laundry equipment, an electric cooking range to replace the old one that conked out spectacularly last year with a show of sparks. Those items save us time and effort. At least, that’s what I remind myself when I have to take the car in again to be serviced. Or when I spend an entire Saturday dealing with clutter, which I would like to blame entirely on my teenage son and my husband but, truthfully, I can’t. Or when I lose a morning to the distraction of every alert that comes through on my cell phone, although a more efficient person would likely already have adjusted the notification settings. Or when, infrequently, we order takeout as a convenience and I cringe at how expensive the meal was, and at how much trash it produced. That’s the problem: those nouns come with a cost.

In the context of home life and some of its many moving parts, it could be said that efficiency as a goal in and of itself is not even always desirable. Writer Haruki Murakami said as much in his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I listened to an audio recording of while I washed dishes one recent Sunday evening. He was referring to his chosen pursuits, not to domestic chores, but nonetheless, when I heard the words “I don’t think we should judge the value of our lives by how efficient they are,” I thought, Oh, thank God. Although my reaction is entirely less sanguine, and a whole lot more shrill, when I find my son wandering around the house looking for the other half of a pair of gloves and he misses his school bus, or when we leave two hours later than we intended for a family outing because we keep forgetting stuff inside, or when I’ve spent hours preparing a meal that doesn’t work out at all. But maybe rather than castigating myself, or the other characters in my household who shape the character of my days, I should learn to accept that we’re more slow food than fast food, more Danish hygge than German engineering.

Easier said than done.

It can be hard to accept, or for me to accept, that delays and inefficiencies are a natural, and sometimes even necessary, part of things we do at home.

Like raising children. Anyone who has ever had the experience of clothes shopping with a toddler knows this. Of course, the end game of child rearing isn’t so much well-oiled machinery as it is considerate, intelligent, responsible, healthy, and happy humans. That said, I admit I felt radiant admiration for U.S. congresswoman Nancy Pelosi when I heard that she trained her five children to fold laundry at a young age. To my mind, that accomplishment alone explains why she’s in charge of things.

I work out of my house, and one of my concessions to efficiency was to set up a dedicated workspace upstairs, a floor away from my dog, who would much rather that I be downstairs petting her or available for frequent walks. My little office is also on the other side of the house from our kitchen, but the immersion kettle still calls out to me, and I answer it by padding downstairs in my thick wool socks to make myself yet another cup of coffee, which I don’t really need, and maybe grab a snack while I’m at it. A more efficient person would take only scheduled coffee breaks, and have packed a lunch to carry upstairs, thereby also packing in more billable hours or yielding more completed written pages.

Home ownership itself is rife with inefficiency, especially when it comes to tackling repairs. My youngest brother, who used to work in the field of home renovation, once told me that when he needed to think a job through, sometimes he would just turn over a plastic bucket, sit down, and stare at what needed fixing. To a habitual multitasker, that would look like slacking. To the person actually completing the work, however, apparently that’s a problem-solving session. To my brother, or to my husband, then, efficiency is best achieved by stopping and thinking and doing one thing at a time. Nothing efficient about having to fix the same thing twice.

Personally, I find that efficiency is often best achieved in motion, preferably at a good clip, and usually while I’m also doing something else. At least until the Universal Law of Haste Makes Waste kicks in. Whether at high speed or in slow motion, though, there’s no getting around the fact that sometimes you have to spin your wheels to get traction.

And maybe efficient and effective are not two peas in a pod. Maybe, as Christopher McDougall wrote in his book Running with Sherman, most of us are just “racing to save time so we can sit around and waste it.” That is, efficient, but not effective. I’ll interpret that to mean I can maybe live my best life even if I don’t ever buy a vacuuming robot. Because chances are, I’m never going to.

And, anyway, so many of my own inefficiencies, or my husband’s, are purposeful and beneficial. I try to cook from scratch because it saves us money, and because I can’t eat half the ingredients in prepared foods. My husband handles a lot of our home repairs because we haven’t always had luck with finding skilled, reliable, and affordable contractors to help us. Besides, he likes working on the house. I garden with a small trowel or cultivator instead of rolling through my yard with a backhoe because I derive pleasure from discovering tiny details while working at ground level. From my then-toddler, whose early vocabulary actually included the phrase “delay tactic,” which is a clue to what we were up against, I learned lessons in patience, at least some days, and have benefited immeasurably from his very existence.

I make tradeoffs where I need to. I speed my way through this to make time for that. I squander here but conserve there. I spend and I save. A long time ago, I worked for a woman who’d say that when it came to delivering projects perfect, on schedule, and under budget, clients had to pick two out of three. The same rule does seem to apply to daily life at home, which comes with its own juggling of priorities, its own choices between saving money, time, or energy.

But the victories, small as they might be, are there. No, I didn’t manage to beautifully wrap and deliver Christmas presents by Thanksgiving, like my sister-in-law did. And I didn’t bake cupcakes predawn before heading off to make a speech at the UN, or perform surgery, like I’m sure someone else out there did. But I mentally composed these last paragraphs while running six miles, then came home and found a cell-phone charger the first time I looked for one. Let’s say a hearty well-done to all of us, call it even, and move on. It shouldn’t be a competition.

Another woman I used to work for once said, if you don’t have goals, you can’t attain them. In the spirit of this, and because I can be forgetful, I recently began using the day planner that lies on my desk not just to make note of appointments and upcoming events but to make note of tasks, large or small, that I want to accomplish that day. I’ll refer to the open page of the book, and if it tells me, “Call for vet appointment,” “Study French,” “Do a load of laundry,” “Go for a run,” or “Finish proofread”—a balance of have-to’s and want-to’s—I feel weirdly obliged to do what it says.

The beauty of these lists, though, is that I write them in pencil. So if I included more than I can possibly get to in one day, which is something I often do, or if I run into delays or would really just rather not today, with a few efficient little flicks of the eraser I can move the task to tomorrow or the next day or to whenever I have a clear line of sight to the bigger picture.