There are four things I must do over and over that I frankly (and ultimately inexplicably) hate doing.
1. Laundry. While I appreciate clean clothes as much as the average young adult, I am a far bigger fan of wearing one pair of jeans a lot of times. My disdain for doing laundry is not limited to the washing and the drying. Nay, friends — it is also the folding and the hanging and perhaps worst of all, the ironing (which is why I mostly only buy clothes if they seem like they’ll look the same after I crumple them). The first step leads to the rest of the steps, and I find all the steps tedious and boring. Which is why I can go two years without logging into Facebook but can’t go a week without running out of pants.
2. Filling my car’s gas tank. Fact: I have owned a car for nine years and I have never looked at a gas price (except for the time I accidentally pressed premium instead of regular and didn’t realize it quickly. You are not welcome, Mobil.). This is because I am irresponsible how much I am paying is irrelevant if “conveniently on my way to someplace else” is the answer to the following question: When and where am I getting gas? Because under any other circumstance, getting gas is worse than doing laundry.
3. Going to the bank. Let me preface this by saying I have never had a bad experience at the bank. I’m always easily in, always easily out. Which is why the dread that overcomes me when I realize a reason exists for me to drive there cannot be explained. I just don’t want to do it. Ever.
4. Unpacking. Because it always leads to [Please refer to point number 1 above.].
The point is this:
Regardless of the ease with which I could do it, I hate doing laundry and getting gas and going to the bank and unpacking. Which is precisely why, when one of those things is on my to-do list, it is always, as in, without exception, the thing I should do first.
When I decide to wait on any of the four aforementioned nuisances, I wind up realizing at, say, 1:14 a.m. on a school night, that I have no clean clothes, or I pull a Kramer in the car, or I owe a colleague a dollar for a year (I don’t own a debit card.) or I treat a very full suitcase like an ottoman.
Doing the worst things first challenges us. It feels unnatural to do what we don’t want to do. But many-a-time, I have learned the hard way that the following quote is so true:
“If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.” -Olin Miller