Why I didn't hire somebody ...
... for cleaning
Actually, this post was supposed to be the “hello world!” post for hyper-exponential.com as it’s great to start things on a “clean sheet of paper”.
Thus, the topic of cleaning seemed perfect to kick-off this. However, during the writing process, I realized that this post is about “when” I made the decision to start this project but it was missing the “why?” .. and I guess many of you will know the book by Simon Sinek “Start with why” [1] or rather parts of this TED talk [2] going by the same name.
So, I decided to dedicate the “hello world”-post to the “why”, so now I can jump back to the cleaning topic;
Many people hire somebody to help them with housework: Clean the house, do the laundry, etc. While it saves you a reasonable mount of time not doing it yourself, you might forget about the advantages of doing it yourself (besides having a clean place to enjoy).
Most kids seem to be in disfavour of doing shores, similarly to their teenage siblings. Only when the same kids enter college and have to work on their thesis, housework seems like a fun thing to do. We like to call it “cleaning procrastination” and dub it with the negatively connoted term “procrastination” but what if that behaviour is not that negative after all?
Maybe you heard the Zen saying “If you don’t have time to meditate for an hour everyday, you should meditate for two hours.”. In my experience something similar happens when you decide to dedicate time to household work regularly.
I came to this conclusion during the last years building ROADIA. For any company founder, the number of things that WOULD be great to do each week is a fraction of what CAN effectively be done even working 80 hours a week and more. Thus, it might seem counterintuitive to invest some of those valuable hours into cleaning the house; especially as cleaning is probably one of the easiest things “to outsource”.
However, it seems that the physical activity of cleaning provokes some sort of “mental cleaning”. Therefore, within a fairly small amount of time (a couple of hours), the messy information accumulated during a stressful week, can be sorted without seemingly putting time into it: Things that seemed nebulous and fuzzy just a day ago, would fall into their natural order miraculously and provide fresh insights on how to move things forward.
Interestingly, to my personal empirical observation “just relaxing” – whatever that might mean to any of us – did not have the same effect.
Additionally, there is this nice perception of “achievement” because one can experience the process from “starting something” to “getting it done” and seeing a visible outcome within a few hours – a thing that is sometimes hard to experience, working on mid-term and long-term goals while riding the start-up rollercoaster.
And so, what seemed a mundane task, became kind of a fix-point, a recharging ritual that would help me to bring back a bit of “day 1” mentality for a new week to come.
Recently, I learned that some people even suggest doing “therapeutical cleaning” and that there is a show on Netflix [3] about it. I assume that the success of this therapy has its roots in similar neurological processes that I experienced.
As you might have guessed by now, the underlying reasoning and the decision for starting this blog became apparent to me after the kitchen was clean and the laundry was sorted.
P.S. If you have the luxury to live in a place that is clearly too big to be swiped in a couple of hours, maybe hire somebody to help but still decide on a particular part of it that you clean up and order yourself. What may seem like a waste of time first, might turn out to be an investment with high ROI.
[1] Simon Sinek: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2011)
[2] Simon Sinek at TEDx: “Shart with Why” on youtube.com (2009)
[3] https://www.netflix.com/de/title/80209379