Broken Windows Theory of Housework
Oct. 3rd, 2012 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackThe broken windows theory of civil order says that if an area looks run down, people don't have much interest in maintaining it, and are prone to graffiti, litter, breaking windows, etc, but if it looks nice, people are surprisingly inhibited to damage it.
Apparently there's a reasonable amount of truth in the theory, but whether there is or not, it's a useful to have a label for the idea.
Exactly the same applies when I do housework. If my kitchen is clean, every little crumb on the surface offends my sense of perfection. It would be so easy to fix it -- why not just quickly wipe it up before I leave?
But if it's already messy, I think "oh, I need to clean this", but that translates to "I need to give this a good going-over, so I'll allocate a few hours tonight, there's no point doing five minutes now", and then it never happens. Whereas, actually, a few five minutes would have made it a lot better, even if not perfect.
Possibly I could have saved a lot of time by listening to people who said "just always keep your kitchen perfect and don't worry your head about why". But having an explanation makes me feel a lot happier about it, and to see an upside in getting things up to spec, and recognise when it might be useful to have a standard less than "it'll never be perfect so I won't try" because if I have a standard I can actually aim for, I can try to keep it there and worry about improving it later.
Apparently there's a reasonable amount of truth in the theory, but whether there is or not, it's a useful to have a label for the idea.
Exactly the same applies when I do housework. If my kitchen is clean, every little crumb on the surface offends my sense of perfection. It would be so easy to fix it -- why not just quickly wipe it up before I leave?
But if it's already messy, I think "oh, I need to clean this", but that translates to "I need to give this a good going-over, so I'll allocate a few hours tonight, there's no point doing five minutes now", and then it never happens. Whereas, actually, a few five minutes would have made it a lot better, even if not perfect.
Possibly I could have saved a lot of time by listening to people who said "just always keep your kitchen perfect and don't worry your head about why". But having an explanation makes me feel a lot happier about it, and to see an upside in getting things up to spec, and recognise when it might be useful to have a standard less than "it'll never be perfect so I won't try" because if I have a standard I can actually aim for, I can try to keep it there and worry about improving it later.