A Clean Fridge

I’m on Day Four of Using Time Blocks to Get Things Done and make headway on some of the never-ending things that need doing that can lurk on in the shadows of your mind. So far it’s going pretty well.

I had a couple of weak days: on Tuesday night Emma was out, so I took advantage of being solo to play a little The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. I usually only play an hour or two of XBox every 1-2 weeks, so it’s a well earned indulgence I think. Usually I play Halo 3 with my friends in Seattle, but lately I’ve been playing some Halo Wars and the new Riddick game, both of which are great. And last night we went out to the concert, leaving just after dinner.

However, tonight I tackled The Fridge! I wish I had a before picture. Honestly we’re clean people and our fridge wasn’t that scary. However, it was overly full, disorganized, and it wasn’t super clean. It was definitely time. So, after dinner I started my 30 minute timer on my iPhone and got to work. Cleaning a fridge isn’t much fun, there are a ton of things I’d rather be doing, but for 30 minutes I could handle it. Except when the 30 minutes ran out, all of the food was still out of the fridge. So I spun up another 30 minutes, and changed the music. When that 30 minutes ran out, I was almost done with the freezer, but knew I still had to take out the trash (which now had old no good food in it), and a few other things, so in the end I spent 90 minutes cleaning the fridge and freezer. And honestly I didn’t mind. Good music, and doing it in 30 minute blocks really helped out mentally. If I’d been thinking “Oh, it’ll take me all night to clean the stupid fridge” I would have put it off again. Now it’s done, it looks great, and I’m happy to have done it.

I’ve also made a slight change to how I mark the grid if I spend more than the allotted time on a task. Instead of just noting how long I spend, I’m marking down multiple ‘X’s. The overall number of ‘X’s on the paper when I’m done with the week will give me an indicator as to how productive I’ve been on these tasks.

Currently it looks like this:

So I’m happy with the approach! Anyone tried it?