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Post by dairy2mama on Nov 23, 2014 0:57:38 GMT -5
How can I transfer game "strategy" to cleaning my house. I win at FreeCell Game on the computer. Has anyone else thought about transfering a strategy with a game they play to decluttering?
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Post by lostchild on Nov 23, 2014 1:37:23 GMT -5
I think of my house as a puzzle. I put the edges together first and then the corners. This is the equivalent of the easiest stuff first. I then address how I think the puzzle should look which is my image of how my house is in my mind's eye. I then change the pieces around till it fits that image.
I think of the deep cleaning as the hard parts of the puzzle. They have to be addressed to get the whole picture.
You could think of it as a strategy game...mind over matter. I prioritize by playing a what if game.
If my house caught fire would I go back for this item? If yes then I create an appropriate place for it and if no then I get rid of it. That one question helped me get rid of forty percent of stuff I had.
When kids moved out on poor terms I figured they could replace anything they left. Tossed it. No regrets.
Stuff that we put in boxes and hadn't looked thru I have been sorting gradually. Those are my time capsules.
I think to myself in a hundred years will this have mattered...usually answer is no so trash.
I have my room in order and now am going thru piles of papers and in marathon three hours I got rid of a shredder's worth of paper,tossed another boxes and a half of stuff and restored sanity to the files by consolidating information.
I also think of my house as beat the old record...I try to decide what I can do to make everything better and I decide how to improve based on that. Think of it as racing yourself.
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Post by Louie on Nov 23, 2014 3:49:49 GMT -5
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Post by larataylor on Nov 23, 2014 5:08:56 GMT -5
Yes! I played a lot of Sudoku when I was really depressed … like all day. I think of my home as a Sudoku puzzle sometimes, or a little square slide puzzle. I've heard others compare their homes to a slide puzzle that doesn't have an empty space so you can't slide anything around.
I think of my whole life as a puzzle sometimes, or a book of puzzles. "Problem" has a negative connotation, but a "puzzle" is something you do for fun. Life is a series of puzzles to solve, smaller puzzles inside of bigger puzzles.
The home really is like a puzzle where you have to get things into the right places.
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Post by dtesposito on Nov 23, 2014 16:02:26 GMT -5
D2M, when I first read this question this morning I thought, well, I PLAY a lot of games to make myself work in my home--if it weren't for games and SOS threads I would never do anything! But making the work into a game isn't the same as using the strategy of game.
So I thought about what strategy you use for Freecell--the only strategy I could think of was mentally staying several steps ahead of your move. So before you move, you have to picture the next step and the next step to see if you'll get stuck anywhere. I guess that could apply to decluttering or cleaning. If you try to picture how things will work before you actually start, you'll foresee problems and maybe make different decisions as you work.
D2M, do you see any other strategies in playing Freecell?
Diane
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Post by cricket on Nov 23, 2014 16:51:42 GMT -5
Freecell does seem to lend itself as a metaphor for housekeeping, all that moving objects around to get them into their assigned places, plus getting blocked and sidetracked with other urgent tasks and having to remember to get back to the first sequence as soon as you can.
In addition to the home cells (a home for everything), Freecell also uses those free cells which work a lot like staging areas or work areas where we keep things temporarily while we are working on them. But in Freecell, you don't get the whole board to use that way, just those four spaces. That could be applicable to a home. If we had defined work areas, and other areas that are off limits to accumulating out-of-place stuff, the house would stay tidier. In Freecell, you don't fill up the free cells and just leave that stuff there. In the game, that would obviously prevent the flow of play, and it stops the flow of the household, too. It would be great to have that same sense of urgency to get the stuff moved out of holding areas and into their permanent homes in the house I have in the game.
I depend a lot on the brain reward ping I get from completing a task. When you finish a sequence in Freecell and it gets sent to it's home, that is really rewarding, feels like progress toward ultimately winning the game, but is also rewarding in it's own right. When I actually finish a task, not leaving it half done, I get that same sort of ping. You have to move from task to task sometimes, but I need to stay focused and work all the way to completion of each task as soon as circumstances allow, no scissors left out, nothing left drying on the counter never to be returned to.
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Post by dtesposito on Nov 23, 2014 17:20:19 GMT -5
Wow cricket, great analogies!
Diane
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Post by PaperGrace on Nov 24, 2014 11:01:55 GMT -5
Sometimes when I'm working on the house I'm reluctant to move or handle something more than once, it seems less efficient to me (perfectionism), but as pointed out above--in games sometimes shuffling/churning is part of the game and allows you to win in the end!
I'd made several attempts to clean out the storage room since we moved in, but this last time I just accepted that some boxes would have to be moved somewhere else without being sorted yet, and that they might still have to be handled several times. Now the boys have their own bedroom. I still have a big pile of stuff to deal with, but it isn't hampering our ability to use an entire room anymore.
I like resource allocation strategy games and sims, like the 'build a frontier town' kind of thing where you assign gathering and building tasks. How can I apply that to my house?
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Post by def6 on Nov 24, 2014 16:35:52 GMT -5
I can surely relate!  The best "ways" for me to get the house clean are like my "strategies" when I play a game. Hitting my mark for cleanliness and organization is like completing the game, beating my high score. Non-Participatory saboteurs (those who sabotage) are like obstacles or opponents. Clutter is like an obstacle in a game.  |
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Post by creativechaos on Nov 19, 2017 3:06:06 GMT -5
bump. this is a brilliant thread that deserves more thought and conversation; especially for all of these creative minds here who love games. thanks for the question, dairy2mama. i too love freecell and appreciate the strategies outlined here and how that applies to cleaning, sorting, and care of home or body. cricket, your freecell metaphors are great - i can really relate to that. and larataylor's idea of "problem" being thought of as "puzzle" is freeing and uplifting and gives some hope when facing difficult tasks or a lot of them. hmmm.... i am thinking of crossword puzzles, which i enjoy. and how you build on words already solved (or home areas already cleared - "maintenance"/defending and building on your gains) and if you can't "puzzle" out a word (not ready, not enough supporting information), you leave it and do another word (task) until you are "ready." (start with the easy stuff first). this would be particularly helpful for sorting/discarding stuff, cleaning up on a deadline, and prioritizing cleaning tasks. another simple game i enjoy is spider solitaire with only two suits - in it i find i often have to "risk" moving the other suit's cards onto a pile to see if that will work and "uncover" a card underneath that i can use and that furthers me in the game. i use this same strategy when i experiment with improving my home situation in a room or space - for example, moving a few pieces of furniture tp support the idea of "activity centers" - making my areas of "use" make sense and having things for that "use" purpose nearby and easy to access. |
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