Thoughtless Habit

Do you have certain parts of your routine that are second nature to you? In fact, they are so second nature that you barely give them a thought. Perhaps things like washing your hair, brushing your teeth, washing dishes, making your favorite meal, or eating your food. When we do things over and over, day after day they become habit.

In one way, this makes life easier. When things are predictable and familiar they require less thought and planning and tasks are completed with relative ease. I can’t recall many times I’ve had a world of trouble brushing my teeth. I can walk around the house and even talk with a slur all while scrubbing my pearly-whites. My mind is free to focus on other things.

There’s another side to the efficiency of habit. We don’t give it any thought. Yes, that’s also the reason I gave above. I’m not very good at brushing my teeth. I brush them too hard. At my last visit to the dentist he told me I’m wearing away at my gumline because I brush so hard. No good. When we don’t give thought to habitual things they can tend to become inefficient, wasteful or unproductive.

Allow me to give a few more examples:

• You get a haircut, shortening your hair a significant amount, but you still use the same enormous blob of shampoo and conditioner that you always did before.
• You put a slightly smaller load of laundry in the washer with the usual full-cap amount of detergent.
• You let the shower “warm up” while you brush your teeth, choose your outfit, etc.
• You let the water run while brushing your teeth.
• You look down and realize you ate every bit of the way-too-much-food on your plate at the restaurant and the button on your jeans is about to pop.
• You bought the fancy, cushy toilet paper and still yank the same 15-square wad off that you did with the cheap stuff.
• Your oldest goes away to college and you still make the same teenage-appetite-size meals.
• You drive your gas-guzzling SUV (because that’s your car) to the post office, hair appt. and out to coffee, while your fuel efficient car sits in the driveway.
• You turn the lights on in the evening during the summer even though there’s still plenty of light streaming in.

I am the case in point on this one. I have a dishwasher and I love it but I also have a daughter and two nieces drinking from 9 different cups and eating from 6 different compartmentalized dishes; all creating the need to wash some dishes by hand. My bad habit: I wash dishes with a soapy dish cloth and the faucet water constantly running. I wash and rinse each dish, one at a time, never filling either sink.

I’ve thought now and then about how much water (especially expensive hot water) this is wasting but always rationalized, “This is the way that I always do it. There isn’t another way that would work as well for me.” I kept my dish drainer in the right-hand sink so I didn’t have a place to rinse dishes, which meant I couldn’t fill the left-hand sink with soapy water either. It occurred to me there must be another way. So, I decided to try something new. I bought a new dish drainer that’s meant to sit next to the sink and drain into it. I know, the same brilliant thing everyone else in the world does. I’ve used it for one day now, filling the left hand sink with soapy water and rinsing my dishes in the right side. It was really obvious to me the amount of water I was saving by doing this and that made me happy. Hopefully I can stick with it and not revert to my lazy dish-washing ways.

It makes me wonder: how many other things am I doing out of habit that I could tweak slightly to be less wasteful and more efficient?

Why I do what I do ~ We ran some errands today as a family and my daughter hopped everywhere. Through the parking lots, she hopped. In the grocery store, she hopped. In the hospital, she hopped. Maybe she’ll sleep good tonight

 photo credit: Lori Greig

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Tagged as: Cleaning, Family Life, Managing Time, Personal Growth, Resourcefulness, Saving Money