PP 305: Stop Shoving the Messes Under the Couch… Or Elsewhere

Kim Sutton Today’s episode and lesson come from a discovery that I made this morning while I was trying to find my youngest daughter’s Zelda’s shoes. If you have children, I don’t know if you know this pain. But somehow children’s shoes go missing in my house just about daily. It doesn’t matter how many times I asked them to take their shoes off and put them next to the door. They are always missing the next morning. So to take us back to the lesson of today, I was looking underneath the couch. And rather than finding a lot of shoes, I found a lot of other stuff. And I don’t want to talk about shoes today, besides what I’ve already said. But I want to talk about shoving the mess out of sight instead of just dealing with it. If you haven’t listened to any prior episodes of the Positive Productivity Podcast, you may not know that I’m a mom of five, my oldest two are 15 and 12, and my youngest three are 4 years old, and then three year old twins. While all of my children are regularly asking for things, games, toys, books, you name it, my older two are old enough to understand that in order to buy these things, they have to earn them. So they both have chores. While my 12 year old Robert is responsible for cleaning the litter box, and then also making sure that our great room which consists of the living room and dining room combined, is picked up on a daily basis. This task regularly frustrates him because he feels like, and I can certainly understand, that every time he picks up the living room the kids, the younger kids go in directly after him and make a new mess. This is no understatement, because those three are certainly walking, talking tornadoes and they really do just that. But I love those five minutes of clean time in my living room. Well, this morning, while looking for Zelda shoes, I realized that Robert has not been doing his chore. Rather than cleaning up the mess, he has been shoving it under the couch. And I know that that’s what he’s been doing because just last weekend, I took apart the whole living room and put everything away. But the mess that I found underneath the couch this morning, I know was not just natural. I know that this was pushed underneath as somebody was trying to speed through his chore rather than dealing with the issue at hand. Why am I talking about this on the positive productivity podcast? Well, because we often do this in our personal life and in our professional life, we find it easier to shove aside the emails that we don’t want to deal with or the conversations that we deal with and we save the mess for later. But what happens is, is that the anxiety builds the amount of work that it takes to take care of that mess increases. And just like this mess that Robert gets to take care of today, it’s going to take so much longer. So stop shoving your mess underneath the couch or deeper down into your inbox folders or deeper into your voicemail, maybe. Maybe you’ve been ignoring those phone calls, tackle it head on right now so that you can get it off your chest and remove the stress associated with it. Clean up your mess folks. It’s not that hard. And honestly, you’re making it much more difficult than it needs to be just by ignoring it. Now with all this said, go clean up your mess and make it a positive and productive day.