I have a dishwasher which I use pretty much all the time, although I do have a few annoying bits and pieces which don’t fit in there. Even though I use it all the time, I very often find I have no clean bowls in the cupboard, and a sink full of dirty dishes. What’s up with that?

There’s no doubt that hand washing dishes is more time consuming than sticking them in the dish washer, turning it on, and then unpacking it when it’s done, but I think the hand washing process works better for getting things off the sink and into the cupboard simply because it’s one single process, with no blocks along the way.

  1. Fill the sink
  2. Wash dish
  3. Dry dish
  4. Put dish away
  5. Repeat until there are no more dishes
  6. Drain sink

Other than the filling and emptying the sink, there are no steps there which require waiting around, or dropping a task while waiting for something else to happen. For comparison, using a dishwasher involves the following steps.

  1. Put dishes into dishwasher
  2. Turn on dishwasher
  3. Unpack dishwasher

Now that’s much simpler, except for the constraints. You can’t put dishes intot he dishwasher until you have finished unpacking it. More importantly you can’t unpack the dishwasher until it’s finished washing (let’s say 30 minutes or so). What this means is that you’ll have to find something else to do while you’re waiting for the dishwasher to finish.

You might wonder why the waiting should matter. After all, that gives you some free time you wouldn’t have otherwise had, but the thing is that you now have to get motivated to do dish-related activities twice rather than just once, and perhaps that means it’s really twice as much effort. I can’t say I can ever remember deciding, half way through washing dishes by hand, to go and do something else because I couldn’t really be bothered finishing them, but I regularly put off unpacking the dishwasher and end up with dirty dishes on the sink as a result.

I guess the moral is that interruptions, especially if they’re built into a task, are really bad if you’re trying to get tasks completed.