6 Principles of Getting Shit Done: Know What You're Doing

Chapter 15

This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Creating and Maintaining Living Spaces That Make Your Life Better (In Spite Of Everything) by Hanne Blank Boyd.

Click here for the full table of contents.

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Let’s just get this out of the way: no matter what you read on the Internet or in any book or magazine there is not one perfect way to do the stuff you need to do in your living spaces. Nor is there a “hack” that makes it effortless or that means you only have to do household stuff once a year, or whatever other bullshit promise it is that you want to let yourself be seduced by.

The only “crazy trick” you’re going to find by clicking those links is that someone’s trying to trick you out of your money. The only thing that’s actually bananas is if you go hand over some of yours for something that doesn’t do (and never could do) what it says it will.

Trust and believe that if there were some magic way to do all this stuff effortlessly someone would’ve stumbled across it by now, and I guarantee you that capitalism would have long since ensured that it wasn’t a secret. (If someone’s convinced someone else to pay them money to keep something secret, that’s called blackmail. Outside of blackmail, not sharing information rarely generates profit.)

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I don’t have any magic bullets that make this work not be work. I don’t even have a method for getting it all perfect every time, or doing it in half the time, or any of that. Over the years I have tried a fair number of things that claimed to be amazing! new! products! or methods or whatever that were going to change my life and turn my house into a gleaming showplace that would spark delight in the hearts of all that beheld it. Some of them weren’t a complete waste of time and money, though most of them were. None of them were the One True Way that transformed everything forever and ever amen.

You are of course at liberty to assume that I just haven’t tried enough things, and that surely this one weird hack you read about online is going to be the gamechanger and after all it only costs $50. You are absolutely at liberty to allow magical thinking to triumph over reason and experience. It’s not my money you’re wasting, or my time. Do what you think you should do.

In the event it doesn’t work, though, read on. I’ve spent a lot of years taking care of households and a lot of years talking to other people about how they do their housework, and innumerable hours reading other people’s writing about it. I’ve learned a few things in the process that actually do help.

Know What You’re Doing

I know it’s kind of a cliché but some things are clichés for a reason. f you don’t have a goal it’s very hard to know whether you’ve reached it. Knowing what you’re trying to do is the essential first step of any project.

Photo by Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash

Not all goals are equally useful for the purposes of figuring out how to reach them. Goals with clear and concrete end points are much more useful than vague goals, what I call “gesture goals” because they sort of gesture in the direction of a goal without specifying what it really is. For instance, “I want to travel more” is a gesture goal. It doesn’t tell you anything about where you want to go, or what kinds of travel you want to do, or even what “more” might mean. “More” is relative. Traveling “more” is a very different thing if your life takes you to other countries several times a year already than it is if you currently travel about as much as a couch pillow.

Think about how different it is to say “I want to visit every National Park in the United States in my lifetime” or “I want to eat a hot dog at a hot dog stand in a different town every month this year.” These are actual goal statements. They clearly indicate what you want to do and give a time frame for doing it. Once you know, for instance, that you are embarking on a year-long hot dog safari, you can start finding out where the hot dog stands are that you want to visit and how to get there and where you’ll stay and if there’s something else you might want to do or see in the vicinity while you’re visiting your chosen hot dog stand every month.