Don’t clean your house!

A great way to put a screaming halt on your creativity is to organize your life. Often, when you feel your energy is starting to come out of you, ready to engage in that next project you really desire you suddenly decide that you need to clean the house.

You’d work much better in a clean house right? I need to organize my life, you think. Perhaps your parents said something like ”a dirty room reflects a chaotic mind”.

Spring cleaning
You suddenly decide to do the big cleaning. Look at all that laundry piling up and all the dirty dishes! My God there is dust everywhere! While I am at it I better clean the windows too, throw out the garbage, clean the yard, reorganize my shelves and delete files on the computer.

So you clean and reorganize. And while you are doing it, you throw annoyed glances at your poor family and/or friends who are not helping you and just happened to be in your way. You get quite angry with them for being so irresponsible. Can’t they see all the shit lying around? Why am I the only one who has to take care of this mess?
You might even break something by mistake while you stress around the house or you find yourself having angry thoughts about others or why life is so unfair.

After a few hours you have a great, clean cosy home. It feels great, everything is as it should. You feel proud of yourself. Perhaps even mom would be proud? You sit down and relax in the sofa, quite tired, but at least you have done something today. That project you thought about earlier you have either forgot by now or you just don’t feel the energy to do it anymore. At least you don’t have to feel bad because you did something.

Important and urgent
Do you recognize the behaviour mentioned above? Have you been there? I know I have many times. It is one of those sophisticated ways we procrastinate.

If you don’t do this by cleaning or organizing, I am certain there is another way you do this. We make ourselves busy with something less important, that suddenly seems very urgent instead of doing what is really important to us. We feel the best and we are doing the best when we do things that are important but not urgent. Often we end up doing urgent things that are not truly important.

Why?
Often when we realize we can do something we truly desire we become afraid. There are many reasons to our fear but ultimately it all comes down to the fear of change; we want things as they are so that we feel comfortable. If we don’t know what will happen we will feel out of control and un-defined.

Doing something new will change our lives.
So even though there are things you love to do you rationalize, perhaps that it is too much work, but you are in fact afraid that your life will change in a way you don’t know about. It is funny we think this way because we have no idea of what is happening the next moment at any time. (I talk more about trying to define ourselves is this article.)

In this way, the task we love to do becomes filled with fear and we become resistant to the creative idea. We don’t want to do things that seem like a risk or perhaps a lot of work. But then we often feel bad for not doing that task. We actually feel pressured from both the side that wants to do it, that now has turned into a “should” and also pressure from the side that believes there is risk and problems.

Now overwhelm kicks in.
You feel it is too much pressure. At this stage, most people just want to zone-out, watch TV or do something easy that makes them forget for a while.
But sometimes the “should” gets too strong. (instead of your desire) You try to compensate and relieve yourself from the “should”-pressure by doing something that you know you can handle. For example, cleaning your house. This you know you can do, you’ll get results quite quickly and you know there is no real risk involved.

Then afterwards, you feel depleted. You have used up your energy for a trivial task instead of focusing on your passion. This often leaves us empty and frustrated.

I have read a lot lately about “pay yourself first”. This is familiar to those who are into financial strategies. So I say: Do what is important for you first; create yourself first.
This is not selfish. If you think it is, then just do it on Mondays, ok.
Seriously, find some time where you really work for yourself. (I talk more about scheduling in this article.)

It is good to have a clean and fairly organized house. But watch your tendency to wanting to clean when perhaps something else is more important. It can also be really interesting to inquire into where we got these ideas that some things are more important than others.