Decide Once. Write It Down. Free Your Mind for Better Things.

You can reduce the mental load for yourself, and share the labor if you live with others, by writing down household decisions that seem trivial, but that come up regularly.

Intentional communities often write down their decisions about small but recurring questions: paradigm-shattering stuff like, “Say…. how many towels do we keep per person, around here?”

These are the simple, logistical, frankly boring household questions that you may find yourself addressing repeatedly on the fly: how many bath towels should you have on hand? What do you need to do to get ready if a storm’s in the forecast? (Things I have bellowed before heading out into the rain: “How can we lose four umbrellas??”)

It’s not overkill to write down your solutions to simple issues that come up regularly. Forcing your head to go through the same thinking process for mundane things, over and over, is overkill: it’s a waste of your mental energy.

Save your mental energy for creativity! Write down your decisions about boring, small — but persistent — problems. This can also save you money.

Write Down Your Decisions About Boring, Small, Persistent Problems

Two examples from my household:

Persistent small problem: ice scrapers trapped inside our iced-over cars.

We live in an area that gets just a few snow storms a year. Dealing with snow and ice is not routine for us.

Plus, our cars live outside, like feral cats. People with garages don’t have the chore of scraping snow and ice off their cars, but we do, a few times a year. We used to celebrate ice storms by going out to stare at our cars, encased in ice, with ice scrapers locked inside the glazed-over car doors. Not optimal.

A-ha! A small, persistent household problem!

What do we wish we had done? This is when you might say to yourself, “Brain wave: What if the Havrons just stored an ice scraper next to the house?”

You’re right! We should have! If we had kept an ice scraper in reserve OUTSIDE the cars, we would not have had to stare at our ice scrapers trapped INSIDE the cars.

Ice at sunrise. It’s pretty, when you don’t have to chip it off.

If you catch yourself saying you should have… write down how you finish that sentence, so you can do it next time.

We wrote down a short checklist: the “OH NO here comes winter!” checklist. Luckily, in the 21st century, winter storms are announced in advance.

If you live with others, it’s good to include everyone in the household when you’re thinking through these things, because everyone remembers something different. The list that I would make by myself is never quite as useful as the list that my husband and I make together.

Here are two things on the winter storm checklist, one from each of us:

Store ice scrapers by the house door, so we can chip the cars out without trying to see if the outdoor extension cord combines safely with a blow dryer.
Get the snow boots down from the attic, and put them by the radiator. (If you must shovel snow, start with warm boots.)

So now we have a short checklist made up of all the things we previously wished we had done. And we feel like geniuses when the ice scraper is at hand, and the snow boots are pre-warmed. Ha! We won winter!

Persistent small problem: multiplying bath towels

Recently we had visitors over the holidays. Visitors like having towels. We went through the linen cupboard pulling out towels that hadn’t been used since before the pandemic. Many, many towels.* A few of the newer ones even matched. (Classy!) Some of the older ones were clearly ready to be donated to the animal shelter.

We sat down to figure out how many towels were enough for our household, and where we were going to keep them. Now neither of us has to use our mental reserves to make these small decisions again.

If You Remember Thinking Previously About a Small Problem, Write Down Your Solution

If you find yourself wondering, “Why am I thinking about this again?” that’s your cue to record your decisions for the next time.

If you’re annoyed each January because once again, all the ice scrapers are frozen inside the cars, write down your hard-earned wisdom, so Future You can just run through a checklist.

This also saves you money. When you write down your conclusions on questions like, “How many towels do we actually need? And where will we keep them? And where will we donate the ones we’re not using?” you also know when you have enough.

Make A System for Recording Decisions about Small, Persistent Problems

You need a system for keeping those pre-made decisions. Where will you find this hard-earned, personally forged life wisdom, when you need it again?

If you live with other people, write this somewhere others can access it. (This is one way the mental load and household labor can get shared…) It could be a Google doc, or an app like Dynalist.

Since one of my values is cutting down the amount of time I spend on screens and the amount of money I spend on apps, we use a composition notebook which cost fifty cents at Target, but may well last fifty years (future-proof, as long as the handwriting is legible).

We keep it in the cupboard near where we charge the phones: easy to remember.

I numbered the pages of the notebook, and reserved a few pages for a table of contents, so we can look up our old decisions quickly. This took less time than coordinating with my husband over an app. YMMV.

Now we can look up what we’ve already thought about.

Don’t use your precious mental real estate to re-think small, persistent problems. Write down your small decisions and your lessons learned, in a place where you can look them up later.

References

Mental Load: Examples, How to Talk About It, & More (2021) Healthline. Available at: https://www.healthline.com/health/relationships/mental-load (Accessed: 20 January 2022).

Notes

*Organization is a solution to the problem of abundance. When I lived in a dorm room, I owned two towels. I did not need to write down any decisions about my towels. Such carefree days…