My Sink

My real sink. Not a stock photo!

Good News, Bad News
The bad news is, I live in a VERY tiny studio apartment. It has ONE sink, and it's in the bathroom. That means whenever I cook I first wipe everything down with vinegar (kills more germs and bacteria than bleach). The good news is, according to all official reports, bathrooms have fewer germs than kitchens. Whew!

This is what my sink looks like 75% of the day. Honest. The other 25% it is filled with dishes, well, a plastic tub set in the sink that is filled with dishes, pots and pans. To wash my dishes I must either set up a small table to put the clean dishes on, or I have to walk out to the living area and put them on the counter there to dry. I used to set up the table, but steps are steps and with 10 steps (5 to and 5 fro), I can rack up a LOT of steps in a day washing my cereal, salad and snack bowls as well as a variety of plates.

When space is at a premium, it's good to stay on top of things so they don't pile up. The thing was, a year ago I wasn't so good at that.


What A Difference A Coach Makes
I can't remember what month, year I met Lorraine Esposito, but I remember it was online and I stepped in to defend her against a loudmouth, obnoxious, hateful, spiteful bully in a forum we were in. We hit it off online and progressed to phone calls and emails. Then we swapped services, my writing for her coaching. Best deal I ever made.

Lorraine helped me identify what mattered to me. Then she helped me learn self-discipline, not by doing all sorts of things with my business or my life, but with my sink.
"Think of one small, very small thing you'd like to see change in your life," she prompted.
"My sink. I'd like to get up to a clean sink every morning," I said.
And so it began. For a month the only thing I HAD to do at the end of every day was to clean the sink. Even with dishes stacked 2 feet high, it still only took 10-20 minutes. I could commit to that. Or thought I could. There were days I didn't clean the sink. I was, I told myself, just too tired. Most days I FORCED myself to do it, grumbling all the while. But then I got the hang of it and 4 out of 7, then 5 out of 7, then 7 out of 7 days the sink got cleaned. I felt better when I went to bed. I felt better when I got up. I liked how I felt about myself when I accomplished this task.

It took a month or more to get to that point, but as each month goes by it's a habit I continue to enforce. Sure, there are times now and then when I deliberately leave dishes in the sink. But it's a choice and it doesn't usually feel good. It's usually because I've been sick. But recently I've started "cleaning as I go" and that makes it REALLY easy to clean at night. Most nights now I just have a glass, or maybe a bowl if I've had a fruit snack (grapes usually). It's nice!

I tried this sink cleaning exercise years ago with "the Fly Lady." She too encourages people to "just clean the sink" as a way to begin tackling household messes. That didn't work for me because a clean sink wasn't motivation enough for me. What Lorraine did was help me figure out why self-discipline was important to me and link it to why I cleaned the sink.  And that made all the difference. I've done the same thing with my weight loss this time—found a motivation and linked it to logging my meals. When that habit is rolling, then I'll exercise for 5, then 10, then 15 minutes a day.

The Miracle of Minutes
So many people fail at things they try to do, like quitting smoking, losing weight, or exercise, because they try to do it all at once. Then they get overwhelmed and give up. The last time I lost weight I started out with a two-hour a day commitment at the gym. Yeah. That lasted six weeks and then I was just too tired, sick and sore to keep it up. I could have kept it up if I'd known the principle of "baby steps." If it had occurred to me that while I was sick and sore I could just work out 10 minutes a day, but keep up the habit of GOING to the gym. But no, it was ALL or NOTHING. And it ended up being NOTHING. If I couldn't go for two hours, I just stopped going. You know how that ended.

The miracle of minutes is that they're baby steps. You build on them. You do what you can and then push yourself a little more than what you think you can each time. Over time what you're doing GROWS. I could clean my sink, the push was to clean it every day, one day at a time. Exercise, eating right, logging my food...they're all habits I'm developing one step at a time. The only one pushing me is me, but as long as I'm taking BABY STEPS, I can do it. Like this blog. My goal is to write something EVERY DAY.  My goal is to LOG my food every day at Lose It! But I can't do it all at once. I start with ONE thing and focus on creating THAT habit, like logging my food. Then I tie exercising to that, then something else to that. Pretty soon it's all coming together and the weight is coming off!!

Habits to Form
What habits am I working on forming now? Here's my list. But remember, I'm ONLY tackling ONE of these at a time! Those in yellow are the two things I'm consistently doing NOW. The others I do when I think about it, or remember them, (a way to prime the pump!!), but they're next on the list!

• Blogging every day
• Logging my food  every day
• Keeping a "Choices" journal (writing down why I made the choices I did and my justification for each choice so I can identify my process)
• Exercise every day, even if it's just 5 minutes a day some day
• Clean off my desk and write out a "to-do" list each evening of the next day's activities
• Eat ONE frog a day (Not a real frog, a distasteful or difficult task as outlined in Brian Tracy's book, Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time)
  

And to think, it all started with cleaning the sink.