I don’t live my life by too many -isms. So I guess maybe that’s a sort of minimalism, but let’s not get absurdly reductive here, even if that is one of my favorite modes. Apart from the possibility of minimalism, there’s feminism and maybe a couple of others, and I’m pretty cool with that. I don’t need a lot of overarching guiding principles.
One I’ve found extremely useful of late, though, has been incrementalism, and I promise you it does have something to do with the lumber-heavy picture above. That picture represents most of the pieces of a shelving unit I’ve been working to build in my garage. I need some more storage space, so I ripped out the useless and awkward cabinets that had been in one corner sometime last year, and I’ve been slooooowly working toward putting more functional shelves in their place.
Most of that slowness, though, came before I started embracing incrementalism. Why? Well, because I kept sort of waiting to get the big chunk of time and energy that I needed to go ham on the project and get everything cut, assembled, placed, and then properly organized. But I kept not getting it, in no small part due to the six month run of back-to-back plays on stage, and another backstage that kind of ate up big chunks of weekends. Combine that with the standard parenting and husbanding and general life maintenance stuff, I just never found the time and/or energy.
But then I started to consider things from an incremental perspective. And I thought about that saying: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly,” as a way to embrace a liberating anti-perfectionism. And I kind of adapted it into “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing slowly.” Because I’m still kind of waiting for a big chunk of time to do the whole project, but I’m also maybe two lunch hours away from having the whole thing assembled properly. Maybe just one, but let’s not push it, because I do still need to actually eat on my lunch hour, and lunch-plus-power tools isn’t really a winning combo. Your mileage may vary.
So basically, I figured if I can break it down into 20 minute chunks spread out over a week or so, I could have the shelves up in a week, and if I’d done that six months ago, the shelves would have been up all winter and my garage would have been a lot less cluttered. Might have even been able to park a car in it, and isn’t that a crazy thought?
I actually started this idea with housecleaning, and then expanded it to writing, and this is one of my first experiments with tackling a building project with the concept. (The real test is going to be unfucking my basement office space, and by unfucking it I mean a pretty comprehensive DIY renovation, which is deeply intimidating.) But the housecleaning has been going well so far, and the writing has been… well, it’s been. I can get behind the concept of writing 200 words a day being better than writing 1000 words once every quarter or something, but I still haven’t quite figured out how to make that work when I’m genuinely stuck.
Housecleaning has been the big breakthrough here, though, and I’m waffling a bit right now between continuing in my sporadic and haphazard method of figuring out which little bit to tackle on a given day, or finally giving in and trying to lay out all the bite-sized chunks of cleaning into a comprehensive rotation. And that does illustrate one of the limits of incrementalism: some things you just can’t effectively tackle in pieces like that. Compiling the huge list of individual chores and then trying to lay them out in a nice, even, 20-minutes-a-day layer throughout the month is just a thing that I’m probably going to have to attack all at once. BUT, the promise of steady progress toward seemingly daunting goals is a pretty attractive promise, and if it means going all out every once in a while, I think that’s worth it.
Anyway, likely more thoughts and updates on this in future. Fingers crossed!