“Put some value on the things that need to be done,” Maynard said. “It’s easy to say, ‘It doesn’t matter if I put my groceries away.’ But it does matter.” If you don’t put your groceries away, you won’t have space to make lunch in the morning, so you might end up knocking over your coffee and having a spill to clean up, she said.
But prioritizing organization is a bit like prioritizing exercise. I know I should do it and that it will help me down the road, but can’t I just watch TV instead?
To help with the boredom factor, I called in Ian Bogost, author of “Play Anything” and expert on the philosophy of play. According to Bogost, categorizing our lives into bins of work and play dooms us to a certain kind of misery. We also miss out on the delight everyday tasks have to offer.
“Everything is potentially interesting,” Bogost said. “You can look at play as a way of describing the way you can manipulate and work with a system of any kind.
A practical application of this might be folding clothes. If you find yourself bored, that doesn’t mean you’ve sucked all interest out of folding your clothes. It means you’ve unlocked the next level, and now you can focus on finding speedier ways to fold or creating a visually-pleasing result.
A slight change in mindset – prioritizing organization and finding joy in doing it – can make a world of a difference.