A few days ago, I found myself in a dilemma. I had just gotten home from school, tired from a long day, and as I walk into my room, I see an absolute mess: clothes covering the floor everywhere, piles of books strewn haphazardly on my desk, and various stapled worksheets and pieces of stationary lying on my bed. Usually, I would clear just enough space on my bed to take a nap and leave the rest of the tidying to another day.

But, then I thought: “Sooner or later, this room must be cleaned up.”

# Should I do chores?

Interestingly, we can, for the lack of a better word, ‘prove’ this by examining a world where I never clean my room:

• My room becomes frustrating to look at, because of all the disorganization
• Because of the disorganization, the time it takes to find a specific book, a specific worksheet, or a specific clothing item becomes ridiculous (imagine > 20 minutes just to take out my required study materials)
• Worrying about the messiness of my room distracts me from being able to do work

This world is suboptimal because the messy room causes an amount of wasted time and energy that is way worse than if I would just clean up my room.

So now we know that I need to tidy up my room, since I don’t like being suboptimal.

# When should I do chores?

But when? When should I tidy up my room? If you’re a productivity guru, the obvious answer is “now”. But even for someone who has no idea about the dogmas of ‘self-improvement’, we can actually show that it is optimal (at the very least, in a hedonistic sense) to do chores as soon as possible. We’ll use an exchange argument.

Imagine a world where you did some task T1 for a bit, then you switched mental contexts to complete a chore C, then you went back and did some task T2. The order of the tasks you do would be

... -> T1 -> C -> T2-> ...

where ... represents the things you would do before T1 and after T2.

I claim that doing tasks in the order

... -> C -> T1 -> T2 -> ...

will never increase your suffering. Firstly, note that since chores are repetitive and straightforward tasks, the time at which you do the chore will basically not affect the suffering incurred by the chore (e.g. If washing the dishes at 6:30pm takes you 30 minutes, it makes sense that washing the dishes at 9pm also takes you 30 minutes).

So swapping C and T1 won’t affect the suffering of C. But will it affect the suffering of T1, T2, and later tasks? I claim that it doesn’t: in both worlds, you need to redirect your attention twice in order to complete C, and therefore, once your chore is completed, the time it takes to mentally transition back to your tasks remains constant.

What if some mental state prevents us from completing C efficiently right now? For example, we might be sleep deprived, sad, angry…etc… Well, if we procrastinated on the chore and did T1, the emotional state would also apply to T1. And since T1 is not less demanding than our chore C, we would suffer just as much by doing T1.

As a final consideration, what if we had no choice but to distract ourselves with some distraction D (in order to fix our sadness, anger, fatigue…etc…)? Well then, it’s still not more optimal to do T1 before C because you could just as easily do your tasks in the order D -> C -> T1 at no additional suffering.

So we can safely conclude that there never a world where it is more optimal to procrastinate on chores.

# The mental cue

This gives me a very elegant argument to tell myself whenever I “can’t be bothered” to do a chore:

First, I ask “Do I want to do this chore sooner or later?”. If it’s an honest no, then I should just never do the chore at all and forget about it.

If I actually want to get the chore done, I tell myself: “I will never be worse off by doing my chore right now because it is the optimal choice”. If I’m still not convinced, I’ll walk myself through the proof outlined in this blog post.