Doing the Dishes

Author’s note: this piece comes enhanced with background music, courtesy of the lovely Johanna, who helped her sound-designing significant other, Matt, record it for one of his plays. For the full experience, roll the tape and continue reading:

This essay’s about something that almost everyone does without really thinking. It’s an act in which, even equipped with the best tools, you still have to get your hands wet. But “doing the dishes” is just a name for this certain type of activity; it’s merely a part used to describe the greater whole.

Dishes don’t do themselves.

You can let the dishes sit there, but you have to do them eventually. At some point, you’re going to run out of clean dishes or start facing the wrath of cockroaches and rotting food, and that’s no fun at all.

It’s hard to do other things when you’re doing the dishes: both hands are occupied at all times, and it’s tough to hear the phone or TV over running water. So you rush through—you try to do the dishes as quickly as possible just to get them over with.

But you can’t rush doing the dishes. If you do, they’ll end up all crusty and you’ll have to do them again (that doesn’t stop you from trying though). Sure, brillo pads help you scrub out the tough stains, but you’ve still got to thumb over the inside edge of the bowl to make sure you didn’t miss a spot. Likewise, a dishwasher can take care of most of the washing, but you still have to rinse dishes, pre-treating heavily caked ones and placing them securely in the dishwasher.

See where I’m going with this?

Other dish-doing activities:

• Cleaning your workspace
• Refactoring messy code
• Deleting and archiving the clutter in your inbox

When you really “do the dishes” without hurrying through them, you learn things. You notice how rectangular dishes have more nooks and corners and are harder to clean properly than round ones. You realize how you’ve been getting dozens of emails with questions and issues you can pre-empt. Or that those twelve lines of code you’re so used to writing can actually be handled with five.

Since dirty dishes beget more dirty dishes, once you start investing time and attention into doing the dishes, you’ll notice that they don’t stack up as often anymore. You’ll get into a habit of cleaning them as you go. When you come across new kinds of dishes, you’ll have a better sense of how they might work with your routine. You’ll start playing games with the order you do the dishes in and the way you stack them on the dish rack. Doing the dishes will become its own fun.

“Whether flying a plane non-stop around the world or washing dishes after dinner, he invests attention in the task at hand.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

The dude with the funny name is right on. Key word: invest. Patience… attention… these are investments that pay out over time in greater sums of themselves. Don’t look at doing the dishes as a chore; start seeing it as daily practice. Do the dishes. And do them well.