Tip #18: Set aside one day for chores

Let's digress a little bit to get boring and practical. When you are on your own, the mundane activities of life become even more burdensome. You might live with roommates that help with common house duties, but there are still a lot of things you have to do alone. Whether it's going grocery shopping, cleaning the living room, doing laundry, or whatever, the drudgery is magnified all the more when there isn't someone to share the burden.

There's no way to get around these dull tasks. Sometimes you can hire people to do it, or use technology to make it go faster, but they still have to get done and they eat into time that you'd rather spend doing more interesting stuff. So, get chores out of the way as efficiently as you can. There are some, like washing dishes or taking out the trash, which must be done daily or every couple of days. For the others, if possible, set aside one day a week to do all of it. Do as much as you can in that day, and then do the rest the next week. If you think about it, many things can wait a week, and if they can't, do them first on chore day. And when I say "next week" I mean "next week", not two weeks later or three weeks later or when you feel like it. Procrastinating doesn't make it go away; it just puts you under more stress because you start to believe it will never get done (and sometimes it doesn't).

Managing time is a discipline that every single person must learn, because it doesn't get a whole lot better after you're not single. You may have someone to help with some of the dry stuff, but relationships require their own time to nurture and develop. They also require balance, which means you're sometimes going to be the one doing chores for the other person too, and those chores are often doubled. Get into the habit of managing those tasks while you're still held to only a single schedule and it will become easier to transfer those habits over when you have multiple schedules to reconcile.