There’s a theory that’s been bouncing around in my head that I’m calling the Litter Box Conundrum and it relates to our habits, chores and motivation. It goes like this…

There’s a routine task that you know needs to be done frequently, maybe even daily, such as cleaning the cat’s litter box. Despite this awareness, you hate the task passionately and would rather pretend it didn’t exist. Eventually your responsibility kicks in and you do the task and since it’s overdue it reminds you just how horrible a task it is, making you grumpier.

Now, the trick to this conundrum is that if you did the task more frequently, say cleaned out your fridge monthly instead of once a year, it would be significantly less painful. But since you build it up as a horrible task, by the time you get around to it, it is terrible.

So how to make the shift?

The first step is always awareness. If you hate mopping, ask yourself if it’s the actual preparation and act of mopping floors or the fact that the floors are so filthy it takes hours and many dirty mop buckets. Same question goes for cleaning out the car, doing laundry, washing windows, trimming the dog’s nails, deep cleaning the oven and so on.

Any task that you feel you inherently hate, ask yourself why. Then comes the challenge.

The next time you do that terrible, terrible chore, make it a point to put it on your calendar to do again within 3 days.

This is where your cognitive dissonance pops in.

But I just cleaned and scrubbed the litter box, it’ll be fine for another week.

Why do I need to mop when the floors are finally clean?

The car looks fine, a lot better than before.

The point is to catch yourself thinking those procrastinating thoughts and push them away. After all, maybe the litter box won’t be as horrible when it’s cleaned out daily. Maybe the car always stays looking good when you tidy it every Saturday morning.

Some chores are just hard for us, for a number of reasons. It could be that you don’t have the proper supplies so it takes a lot longer (though that might just be marketing trying to get you to buy more stuff), it could be that the chore is physically demanding or mentally tough to do.

I don’t know all of the background that might be going into your struggle, beyond the universal “I’d rather be doing something fun than this chore!”

The real challenge is proving to ourselves that a daily 15 minute chore, like doing all the dishes and putting them away, is a better mental swap than a 2 hour marathon dish cleaning when you no longer have any clean spoons.

A quick mop every day in the most heavily trafficked areas of a home is a better tradeoff than a horrible, depressing monthly scrub that does your back in and makes you think about selling the dog who keeps tracking in those muddy paw prints.

In the end, this conundrum is just the logical fallacy that we can put off tasks that we don’t like and they’ll somehow get easier to complete. In fact, delaying an unpleasant chore just makes it harder to get done and makes us less likely to do it on the regular.