6 Principles of Getting Shit Done: Touch It Once

Chapter 18

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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One thing on which my spouse and I have always agreed when it comes to getting things done around the house is that it’s better to touch it once. By “it” I mean anything you’re doing or working with, whether it’s cleaning your eyeglasses or dealing with an entire vacation’s worth of laundry. By “touch it once” I mean do the job completely, beginning to end, all at one time if you possibly can.

Obviously there are things you cannot do all of all at once. You cannot do an entire vacation’s worth of laundry at one time unless you go to a laundromat with lots of machines available at the same time. But you can set aside a day where you cycle all that laundry through your machines at home, load after load, folding it or hanging it up and putting it away as it is finished, until all of it is done. It’s not a bad way to spend a reentry day, honestly, and there’s plenty of space to do other things -- do your post-vacation meal planning? sort through all the pictures you took? take a nap? pack up some snacks to take to work for the coming week? -- during the times where laundry is washing and drying and doesn’t require your active attention. At the end of the day, the laundry’s completely done and ready to go again so the biggest post-vacation headache has been managed, and maybe a few other things got done besides.

Photo by Tommaso Pecchioli on Unsplash

There are lots of benefits to touching it once.