This is my Japanese-style shower.
It’s a separate room from both the sink and the toilet, with stone walls, a stone floor, and a sliding plastic door. The bathtub is deep enough so you can sit with your knees hugging your chest with the water up to your neck, and it’s surprisingly comfortable. The shower head detaches and can be held in your hand, fastened up high (my preferred style), or clipped at waist-height so you can wash yourself while sitting down. Because the walls, door, and window are all watertight you can spray water anywhere you want, and it all runs down that big drain in the lower left-hand corner.
I’m showing you this because 1) It’s a pretty cool way to take a shower, and 2) It’s a bitch to clean.
I’m not kidding—when I first moved in the basin below the drain was coated with rusty, black sludge, old hair, and putrid water that overflowed whenever the water backed up (which was often). Because the drain wasn’t working like it was supposed to, all the dirt, hair, and other filth that accumulated after every shower would coat the drain and just kind of sit there, forming a miasma of red, brown, black, and green mixed with endless amounts of hair. It wasn’t pretty.
Because the water would back up and drain incredibly slowly whenever the drain got clogged, every two weeks I found myself putting on a pair of rubber kitchen gloves (which I bought specifically for this disgusting job) and picking out the accumulated wad of hair and filth.
This job actually took less than a minute to do, but planning time for it (“Oh man, I’ve really got to pull the hair out of the drain before my shower tomorrow…”), putting on the gloves, pulling out the hair, washing the gloves, and putting the gloves away turned the whole thing into an arduous process that I never, ever looked forward to.
Then, just before New Years when I was wrapping up a lot of things, I set aside an entire Saturday afternoon for cleaning. I put away a bunch of stuff I’d accumulated but didn’t have places for, I sorted some books that had been sitting in piles since I came to Japan, I dusted and vacuumed everything, degreased the kitchen burners, cleaned the toilet, washed out the windowsills, and yes, finally, gave the shower and drain a really thorough scrubbing with bleach and soap.
Now the drain doesn’t clog anymore, and I feel a hell of a lot better.
Having a Dirty Apartment Distracts Me in a Way I Don’t Realize I’m Being Distracted
Looking back, I put off cleaning the shower drain both because I was busy (as always), but also because I thought I was playing it smart. By my old logic, if I put off cleaning the drain for an extra few weeks or months, then I could wait even longer until the next time I needed to clean it. This could potentially turn a job that needed to be done 4 times a year to a job that needed to be done only 3 times a year (the same logic I used to follow with haircuts), thus saving me more time overall.
Looking back, this was really stupid for three reasons:
- I was already wasting two minutes every two weeks unclogging hair and grime from the clogged drain. Over several months, these smaller decloggings wasted WAY more time than the bigger cleaning.
- I was turning a moderate-sized job into a lot of smaller jobs that had to be done over a longer period of time, meaning that every two weeks I had to pull on those damned rubber gloves again.
- Most importantly, every time I took a shower, or even looked at the shower, a small part of me thought about how I needed to unclog that drain. This distracted me from other things I needed to be thinking about—or kept me from just plain relaxing at the end of the night.
Now I don’t think about the shower drain at all because it hasn’t so much as slowed down in over a month. It’s simply not a problem anymore, so it’s not weighing down on me as yet another thing I have to take care of.
Looking back, I never made the shower drain enough of a priority to actually write it down on my To-Do list, partly because it didn’t seem like a big enough problem, but also because I didn’t want to face the reality of doing this dirty job. In retrospect, this was another mistake.
A big part of why I make To-Do lists is so I can organize everything I need to do into one place where I don’t have to think about it anymore. If it’s not written down, I worry I’m going to forget it, so throughout the day, week, or month I find myself constantly thinking about these things I don’t want to lose track of (Have to pay the credit card bill, Have to call the landlord about the broken washing machine, Have to email this person about the editing job, etc.). Though shuffling these things to the front of my brain takes less than one second, it’s still a distraction, still a worry, and still yet another thing to keep track of. I find this to be an especially nasty problem for small items I don’t actually deem important enough to write down on the list.
Keeping Your Space Clean Helps Eliminate These Distractions
For me, looking at the clogged shower every day was a miniscule worry that never got big enough to become a Real Problem, but over time, I spent so much time thinking about it in small chunks that it sucked away more mental energy than I devote to most of my Real Problems—and that’s not cool.
Now, multiply that amount of distraction times an entire apartment I hadn’t been cleaning, so that every time I saw the coats of grease on my burners, the trash that hadn’t been taken out, the dust on my bookshelves, the pile of work papers I hadn’t sorted through, and the heaping hamperful of laundry I hadn’t done, I was bombarded by an army of minuscule distractions every single day I was in my apartment.
Simply put, doing a thorough cleaning made all those distractions go away, which helped me realize how big an impact they were having on my ability to focus. For me, this peace of mind was well worth the few hours I spent cleaning up (while listening to podcasts, no less), and it served the same purpose as crossing excess items off my To-Do list: it gave me less to worry about, and helped me focus on the things that matter.
Plus, it got me away from the laptop for a while ;-)
So I totally have an Instagram now where I post cool and offbeat pics from Japan—check it out!
Plus, you know, there’s other ways to follow me too…
But I Also Have a Day Job on Facebook
Occasional Email Update List (I send out cool extra stuff sometimes!)