How To Teach Yourself How (You're Right, It's Not Obvious)

Chapter 12

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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I’m going to assume for the sake of argument that if you’re reading this book, you want to know how to do the things you need to do to keep your living space functional and pleasant I’m also going to assume that some combination of the following things are true:

• You don’t know how to do all of the tasks you need to do for your living space

• You don’t feel like you know how to do some or possibly any of these tasks very well

• You feel like you’re already behind, and you should already know

• You feel like you should already know because people act like these things are obvious -- saying things like “who doesn’t know how to do their own laundry?”

• You don’t find these things obvious

• You’ve gotten caught in the Catch-22 where you don’t find that these things are obvious but people act like they are so it’s very difficult to find the help you need to learn

Fucking frustrating, isn’t it?

Because it is supremely frustrating and because that Catch-22 is not your imagination, I’m going to break down the process of figuring out how to learn household skills when it’s not obvious. Because I mentioned it above, I’ll walk through this process using the example of doing your laundry.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Step 1: Begin with the end.

The ultimate end goal of doing your laundry is to have fabric items -- clothes and towels and such -- that are clean and ready to be used again.

Step 2: Identify the individual victory conditions that make up the end goal.

There are two parts to the end goal of “doing your laundry,” two conditions that must be met. One is that the items be clean. The other is that they be ready to be used again.

Learning is how you get to know things and practice is how you get competent.

Step 3: Figure out what actions get you to the end goal.

Think in terms of verbs, action words. In the case of laundry, that’s gather the laundry, transport it to wherever you’re going to wash and dry it, then fold or hang up the items, transport them again to wherever they need to go, and put away the items you laundered. In some cases it might also include steps like ironing or handwashing or hanging things to dry.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash