ohblondie, you and
danny15 asked how I came to pick 8 minutes. Here's the very long 8 minute story:
I had tried for several years to follow Flylady and declutter for 15 minutes at a time.
I was never able to do housework for 15 minutes. I would either get distracted and find myself re-designing the house when I was supposed to be washing dishes, or I would over-focus, and end up spending 2 hours cleaning out a crevice to perfection.
Over and over, I failed, and it really hurt. What grown woman can't even stay focused and on-task for 15 minutes!!! ME!
I felt so defeated. Hopeless. How could I ever dig my way out of the mess I lived in, if I couldn't even work for 15 minutes?
I really felt like an abject failure. I had lived in squalor for so long, and it had been such a painful part of my life, I was desperate and defeated. I would wake up at night, in a panic that I would die in this mess, and feeling totally powerless to do anything about it.
I was coming from a REALLY dark, hopeless place. I was grasping desperately for a ray of hope that there would be some positive way out of the #3ll I was living. I had many, many dark thoughts. As a last ditch effort, I devised a plan.
Flylady always says to adjust her plan to work for you. (None of her plans worked for me at that time.) I decided since 15 minutes was too long for me to focus, or gave me too much time to get deeply focused, I would try something shorter.
I thought about 1 or 2 minutes (which was about my attention span on most days), but that didn't seem like long enough to do anything. I tried five minutes, but that didn't really seem like long enough, either.
Ten minutes was too long. I wanted something that challenged my attention span, but not too much - I didn't have much emotional stamina - but I didn't want so much time that it allowed me to get off ìnto deep hyper-focused cleaning, either.
I tried 7 minutes, which seemed good, but I decided to challenge myself to one extra minute. And one extra minute WAS a challenge.
Besides, 8 is the number of new beginnings, and I desperately needed a new beginning. I really liked the idea that working 8 minutes would give me a new beginning. A little bit of extra motivation there. Every time I successfully completed 8 minutes, I felt I was making a new beginning for myself.
I decided to set myself a (hopefully) attainable goal - I would work for one 8 minute session a day. That was it!
I was so tired of continully failing at the 15 minute challenge, and everything else I had tried, that I decided if I worked for 8 minutes a day, I would be doing more than I had for months. If I worked for 8 minutes a day, I had met my goal, and was successful and victorious for that day. (I was in such a dark hopeless place emotionally, I really had to take it one 8 minute victory at a time.) I was so tired of constant failure and defeat, I decided I would celebrate each 8 minute victory as though it was really something. Because for me, at that time in my life, it was really something.
I often suffer from severe demand resistance.
Eight minutes was short enough that I felt like it was doable. Many a time I've told myself, "It's only 8 minutes. I can do anything for 8 minutes." It was really such a small amount of time and only once a day, that demand resistance didnt kick in.
At first, actually, I could barely focus for 8 minutes. I had spent months doing not one blessed single thing, and 20 seconds seemed like an eternity to wash dishes. The first few days, I kept checking the timer to see if 8 minutes was about up, when only a few seconds had passed! But gradually my tolerance built up.
Eight minutes was also really good, because it didn't give me enough time to get too deeply into hyper-focusing. The 8 minute timer would always snap me back to reality before I could get too obsessed with a task. It kept me moving along, more or less on track.
Every time I completed 8 minutes, I made a tic mark on a piece of paper, with the date beside it. That was my reward - my gold star or sticker for successfully achieving my goal.
Even though my house was so deeply cluttered that there was no visible change in the environment, I could look at that piece of paper, with all those tic marks on it, and know that I had successfully achieved my goal each day. I could look at the paper and know I had made progress. It was a visual trophy of my accomplishments, even when my home didn't look any different. I felt pride when I looked at all the tic marks and knew that each one represented a success, a victory, a goal achieved, and an improvement in my home.
When I looked around and got discouraged at the mountains of clutter, I looked at the tic marks on the paper, and knew progress was being made. I focused on the number of tic marks, not the appearance of my surroundings.
I found many advantages of working for 8 minutes.
It was a small enough time that I didn't dread it too much. No demand resistance. After all, I can do anything for 8 minutes.
It kept me from feeling overwhelmed at the size of the job. I don't have to clear that mountain of clutter. I only have to move, doing some form of cleaning or clearing for 8 minutes. It doesn't even have to be an efficient use of 8 minutes, as long as I keep plugging away at it for 8 minutes.
I could clean without having all day, or a big chunk of time to work. Back during that time, my schedule was extremely hectic with my little grandson and my mother and everyone else's needs.
I discovered that I could sandwich 8 minute tasks in between waiting for DGS to brush his teeth, waiting for Mother to get her shoes on, waiting to go to an appointment - any time I had only a few minutes, I learned, I could put them to good use doing 8 minutes' worth of cleaning, and felt very virtuous as I walked out the door with all I had done in 8 minutes, and another check mark on my paper. I felt like a very good steward of my time.
Often I was amazed at how much could be done in 8 minutes.
And as the check marks accumulated on my paper, I felt more and more successful. Good positive reinforcement for a goal that was realistic for me to attain.
Because 8 minutes was a short- enough time that I could make myself get up and do it, I would. Then, I discovered, more often than not, I felt like doing another 8 minutes, and another, and another. Sometimes in a row, sometimes, here and there throughout the day.
Many days, I ended up working for an hour or two, 8 minutes at a time in between family interruptions. Once I started, I usually felt like continuing.
The thought of winning more tic marks was motivating, much like a child collecting stickers for completed tasks. I would work to get tic marks.
And just being up moving made me feel like continuing. The law of inertia clearly works for me. A body at rest stays at rest; a body in motion stays in motion.
But if I didn't keep working, if I only worked for 8 minutes, I still had achieved my goal and the day was a success.
There were plenty of nights when I had not done a sigle thing, and it was late, and I was tired, but still thought, "you know, I can do just 8 minutes and still achieve my goal." And I would. And it wasn't too much or too hard.
I made huge progress working 8 minutes at a time. But I didn't have a plan for maintenance, or a plan to control acquisitions, so I didn't maintain my progress.
But working for only 8 minutes is still something I can always do.