The Magic of Index Cards: How to Know When Something Is Done
Let me say right now that this is about checklists; and to this day I still struggle with using them, because a big part of my brain thinks I don’t need no stinkin’ checklists.
But this is how I discovered how incredibly useful and liberating it is to write routine decisions down, when I was 18 years old.
(Very) Young Adults Plus a Three-Ring Binder, Plus Index Cards, Equals Independence
You can learn a lot about organizing yourself from understanding how intentional communities organize themselves. Groups that live together (housing co-ops, artists’ residences, monasteries…) have to spell out expectations that individuals or families often leave unspoken. This goes from high-level questions like values to baseline operations like cleaning a bathroom.
In an intentional community, you have to put expectations in writing. You have to have transparent standards that everyone can see.
In college, back in the last millennium, I lived in a women's co-op house sponsored by the university but run entirely by students. Sixteen students cooked the meals and cleaned the common areas: the bathrooms, kitchen, halls, and living room. Because of this, we enjoyed home-cooked meals, a clean environment, and much cheaper housing than living in a dormitory or off-campus.
But students are a highly mobile population. So every year, many students left, and new ones came in. And yet, the work of keeping our communal house clean and everyone fed went relatively smoothly. This is because previous residents had written down the whole system, from a time when students brought typewriters to school instead of computers.
The women's housing co-op was started in the 1930s. By the time I became a house manager there, the co-op had run along for half a century with a three-ring binder and a slew of index cards.
The three-ring binder outlined all the procedures, from paying bills, to signing up for chores, to weekly meeting agendas, to handling disputes. The kitchen had a box filled with recipes typed on index cards, and scaled to feed 16 people.
And we also had index cards posted in each common room (the house's shared living room, dining room, halls, kitchen, bathrooms), with a cleaning checklist.
Those index cards took the vague word "clean" (which means different things to different people) and spelled out precisely what it meant for any given room.
A new person coming in would know how to clean the bathroom (and she would also know when she was done). A distracted person could do it too — because a checklist helps with focus. And all of us got to live with clean bathrooms every day.
You Plus a Checklist Equals More Mental Bandwidth (Mental Independence!)
If you are not sharing a bathroom* between sixteen people, writing down and posting a cleaning checklist for your bathroom probably seems like overkill.
But I also think some principles here are helpful, even if you live by yourself.
Get lists out of your head, so you have room for more interesting ideas.
Figuring this kind of checklist out (or negotiating this, if you live with others) settles two questions and makes the answers transparent and visible:
Is the room clean enough? (You have visible, transparent expectations, so this becomes a yes or no question: is the checklist complete or not?)
Is the job done? (If the checklist is done, so is the job.)
If you figure out a) what needs to be done, b) how often it needs to be done, and c) who is responsible for doing it, this brings a lot of clarity. You no longer have to figure out what needs to be done, or when to do it.
You’re literally getting this stuff off your mind and on to an external list.** (A second brain!)
Seriously…. get this kind of stuff out of your head.
This clarity gives you the mental bandwidth to think about more exciting things than household chores.
Notes
*These were not your average household bathrooms, so don’t picture a line of fifteen people in bathrobes, holding their toothbrushes, yelling at one person in a single-serve bathroom each morning to hurry up. One bathroom upstairs, one downstairs. Each one had two toilet stalls, two sinks, and two shower stalls. So instead picture a line of two to four people in bathrobes on each floor; holding their toothbrushes, yelling at four to six other people to hurry up. (Kidding! Sort of.)
**And of course checklists like this can live on phones and tablets and in shared documents, too… but what is useful about a paper checklist is that it can just live in the same room it applies to; and it is immediately accessible to anyone who can read — no passcode required.
Plus, if you blast it accidentally with the spray cleaner, the consequences are much less expensive.