242: Jumpstart Challenge Day 4 - Micro-Task 15 Minute Race

Welcome back to our jumpstart challenge that we're doing all this week. We are on day four.

And so far, we've done our 15-minute spit clean. We've tried a 15-minute before and after time-lapse challenge. We have done the roll the dice game to eliminate our decision of where to even get started for our 15 minutes. And if you have happened to missed any of these days, you're just jumping in where we are right now, that's awesome. Jump in, stick with me. Every single task is independent of one another. There is no rhyme or reason to the order.

And you can do them from here and move yourself backwards to 239 and try one each day. Or you could do multiples on a single day. Each one's only 15 minutes long. So however much time you have or however much movement you want to push yourself into, each of these jumpstart challenges works independently. Go for it. If you are new here, I do want to say welcome. I'm Joy. And if you want to know what this podcast is all about, please listen to this.

A wise person once said, everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it's stupid. Well, Fish, quit trying to climb trees while getting advice from well-intentioned monkeys. It's time to jump in the water and learn how to swim with the current of your life. I'm Joy, a professional organizer, mom of four, and fellow Fishbrain.

If you're looking for a place to get understanding, encouragement, and ideas for your home that actually fit how your brain thinks, then I'm glad you're here. Let's ditch the type A advice and embrace what makes our brains and our homes unique. Together, we could have a joy-loving home. All right, I got a little rambly yesterday, but I am about to head off to a client's house to do some in-home organizing today, and I am going to jump right in and get going.

So today is going to be called the Micro Task Race Challenge. I just made that up as I was speaking out loud. I don't know what I had a name for it, but anyway, the goal here today is, and I really recommend a paper and pencil because I think your brain will slow down if you're trying to type this. Maybe you work faster typing. So your call, but I like a paper and pencil. Anyway, this microtasking race that we're going to be doing is to do as many microtasks as possible in your 15 minutes.

So you are going to feel like you're rushing and that is the point and that's cool. So I'm going to give you a concrete example, but this can be done in any room of your house. So let's just envision the kitchen, okay? So on your piece of paper, just jot down one through 10. If you happen to get 10 tasks, awesome. If you only get three tasks, still great. There's no lose in this race. It's okay. The point is I'm going to train you to see the micro tasks in what you're doing.

So set your timer, work the whole 15 minutes, then we're going to hit the paper again. But what you're going to do in those 15 minutes. Let's say you ran the dishwasher last night. So you open the dishwasher and you get it put away and then you gather all the dirty dishes in a soapy, sudsy sink that you've been running while you've been emptying the dishwasher and you start wiping out all the. Make sure you turn the sink water off, can be distracted and forget to do that.

And then you rush over to the, to the living room and you, you know, do a real quick grab of all the toys, you throw them back in the basket, you straighten the pillows, you fold a blanket. And all of a sudden the timer's gone off and you're like, okay, I did three things, Joy. I, you know, emptied my dishwasher. Actually did two. I emptied my dishwasher and I straightened my living room. How did that help? Well, walk over to your paper, and now I want you to break it down into the micro tasks.

The micro tasks were, you put away the silverware. You can break it down even further. You put away the knives, the forks, the spoons, the extra utensils. You put away the glasses, the mugs, the bowls, the plates. You put away the dishes off the table and off the counters. You wiped the counters. You can break your counters into, I wiped off my island, my countertop around my stove, my countertop around my sink. You can say, I cleared at least 15 things off the floor.

I fluffed five pillows. I folded three blankets. There are so many ways to break down the task you did. I know I just said at least 15 things in 15 minutes. Why is this useful as an exercise? Well, for one, it allows you to reframe what you think of as accomplishments, right? You're giving your brain 15 little baby wins, but your brain just sees them as wins. And each win gives you that little dopamine spike that you're reaching for and you're searching for.

Every win makes that brain feel more excited to get the next win. And so as you're jotting these things down and you go, wow, okay, in 15 minutes, I just did 15 tasks. I want to set my timer for 15 more and keep moving. You can do that to kind of wake up your brain, get that surge of dopamine you need to keep yourself in action, and then channel it towards the other tasks that maybe actually need your brain. And they're not so automatic autopilot of a task like emptying the dishwasher.

But it allows us to not get to the end of an exhausted day and feel like we did nothing. If we look at that and see, wow, we actually did a lot of things in a very little bit of time, it also helps retrain our brain to believe, to quit the belief that we need like an hour to get any change in our house, that there's no way I can just clean something up in two minutes.

Well, if all you have is two minutes before you walk out the door, instead of picking up your phone and killing time while you're waiting on somebody, to go, wow, I actually could clear all the countertops and at least get all the dishes over by the sink. And then when I walk in from wherever my task is, that's one less thing I have to do later. It is just us realizing that things don't take quite as long as we realize.

If you happen to be part of my free community, which you can get to by going to bit.ly slash joylovinghomecommunity, in there I posted on day two, my before and after with my little time lapse of a, it wasn't a ridiculously messy mudroom because I had cleaned it up once already since school was getting started.

But I had drug a bunch of stuff out trying to organize some things for our dogs to be watched by a brand new dog sitter and I have been walking by it for two weeks because I just didn't have the time to pull it together. If you watch my time lapse and I show you the timer what I plan to have take 15 minutes took me six. Six minutes to get that space back into beyond usable it looks great. Six minutes of something I'd been avoiding for two weeks, and now it's done.

Those are the things we have to keep retraining our brains about.

So give this one a try. See how you feel about micro-tasking and share your information with me. I'd love to hear from you. I am joy at joylovinghome.com. And for anybody who has emailed me recently, my apologies. Life has been crazy as I've gotten my kids off and started in their various locations. And I am just now digging back through my emails. So please be patient. It's just me. I will get responses as quickly as I can.

But anyway, I hope you're enjoying this challenge. We have one more day tomorrow. And until then, continue to choose joy.