My dishwasher is going on vacation

Ok, so it has been established that I am in dire need of some more organization and order in my life and house, hence my New Years Challenge #1. Well, as a step in the right direction I have decided to send my dishwasher on vacation for an unspecified period of time. In other words, I am not going to buy any more dishwasher detergent now that we are out, and I am not turning the machine on for quite a while. It gets to go to a warm and sunny place and enjoy some of those fruity drinks with the cute little umbrellas. It is off duty!

Let me explain my reasoning for this. In my quest to conquer mess and disorder I have tried to identify why an area gets messy in the first place. So, in the case of the kitchen, I have come up with the following. I cook, we eat and the dishwasher is a blessing and a curse. Cooking and eating obviously generate dishes and the dishwasher is designed to tackle those. Don’t get me wrong, it can be the perfect place to hide or stash dirty dishes in a hurry and it does not require much of my time to actually get the dishes from the dirty to the clean state. It also willingly takes on a task that, let’s face it, I do not love.

However, when we generate more dishes than what fits in the machine at one time then we somehow decide to “save” the remaining dishes for the next cycle. This is good and dandy, except by the time the next cycle is due to happen we already have a whole new stack of dishes from another meal that need to go into the machine too. In turn leaving some of the dishes to wait for yet the next cycle….you get the picture. By the end of the day there are always leftover dishes that need to be done despite having run the dishwasher several times during the day.

Therefore, I have decided to eliminate the middle step all together. Once I prepare a meal I have no other option than to do all the dishes since there is no machine taking care of some of them for me. The “waiting for the next cycle” excuse will no longer be valid in regards to leaving dishes on the counter. We will have to do all the dishes right away and not wait to tackle the whole pile at the end of the day.

So, as I say “au revoir” to my dishwasher, I am dutifully reporting to habit-forming dish-duty 102! Ok, so I will admit that I have kind of tried this once before but I was not very strict about it, nor did I stick with it for the 21 days it supposedly takes to form a habit. So, here we go again! This time I will succeed because this time I am putting it out there in the blogosphere and therefore making myself accountable. This may seem like a small feat to most people but it is obviously a bit more of a challenge for me, so your support is greatly appreciated. Here is to Challenges #1 and #3 and #4!!