Comfort and Convenience
This is part two of a series about how I organize, using examples from my own life and home.
We Had A Problem
We used to live in a house on a hill. The view was beautiful - but street level was 42 steps, or three flights of stairs, below our front door.
It was a young person’s home.
The home was designed in the 60s by the architect who lived there. I would assume that the view was important to the architect, but he also knew the hill would end up being a pain. So, he built a system that used pulleys to raise a platform up and down the hill to help people with mobility issues, take up groceries, and assist with large deliveries. Google tells me the rail system is called a funicular.
By the time we purchased the house, it had gone through a few owners and the last occupants were a group of nice, but rambunctious college boys. Apparently, they had a lot of fun the day it wound up broken.
Anyhow, here was this fabulous house, with too many steps and a broken (and we would find out later, not remotely to code) funicular. Being that we were late 20-somethings, we didn’t think too much of it - after we recovered from the move that is.
The reality is that the inconvenience and discomfort of having the garage and street so far below our house had a big impact on our quality of life.
We’ll be talking how this affected my family’s day to day life, momentarily.
We’re All Different
Your home is for you.
Everyone has different factors at play when considering what is comfortable and convenient. Being able to tolerate any more or less doesn’t have a moral value. Sometimes we tolerate more because we’ve been conditioned to do so - the most positive example of conditioning this way would be parenthood. Getting up at 2:30 in the morning to feed and change a baby is not comfortable. Making dinner for your sick kids, when you are sick too, is not comfortable. Parents do it because their job is to care for someone who cannot care for themselves.
Our Culture Sends The Wrong Message
The more insidious example of increased tolerance is from cultural influence. Often society expects us to handle our discomfort or inconvenience with a smile so we don’t inconvenience anyone else. Though at times this may be necessary outside of the walls of your home, we need to leave it at the door.
Do You Have Lower Tolerance To Discomfort and Convenience?
Good for you for identifying it. You could be suffering from burnout or have sensory processing issues - or both. Regardless of why, you have a right to explore your stressors and problem solve solutions. If you live with others and need to change a shared space, you’ll have to negotiate between their needs and yours. The bigger need should be the one accommodated for. But, if you live alone, go to town! Everyone is entitled to a comfortable (as well as a safe and secure,) home.
A “perfect” front door.
A Trashy Problem
When I think about our old house, I often cringe a little. See, I always idolized the houses in my neighborhood with perfectly curated front porches. You know, the ones with the brightly painted front door, a bench or a porch swing, big healthy potted plants, pumpkins spilling over the steps in the fall, a lush green wreath in winter.
Our front door had a full bag of kitchen trash and recycling leaning against the wall… and of course, I refused to go and get ugly plastic bins for our front door because I didn’t want to encourage us to forget to take the trash out. This resulted in visitors being greeted first by a 42-step workout, then finally two juicy bags of trash to hang out with while they waited for us to answer the door.
It wasn’t very welcoming.
Unfortunately, the inconvenience of taking a trash bag down every time it was filled caused us to only do it if we were on our way out. Which in combination with our 50+ hour workweeks made it likely that the trash would be left out overnight. I am shocked we didn’t have more raccoon issues.
This wasn’t the only problem our 42 steps caused… but let’s switch gears for a moment.
Most people have a reasonable idea of what comfort and convenience are and why they matter. However, the culture we live in does a great job of discouraging us from thinking about it as thoroughly as we deserve to.
So, let’s break down the concepts of comfort and convenience to make sure we’re on the same page, then talk about why they matter.
Comfort
When you think of comfort, keep in mind the of the story of Goldilocks and how each factor in her the bears’ space had to be just right.
Some factors that affect comfort (with examples,) are listed below. Each could be too much, too little or just right for you:
Even if minimalism is your design style, the scale of this room and layout contribute to it feeling uncomfortable.
Size and shape of place or object
A bedroom full of jagged angles would not be relaxing, and neither is a desk that is only large enough for your laptop.
Conversely, though we think of bigger as better, interior designers know that a very large room can be harder to plan for than a smaller space.
Temperature/humidity/rain and wind
Try sleeping with your feet cold, or sleeping when it’s hot and muggy, how about reading a book when the wind is flapping the pages. All activities have an ideal conditions, and not so ideal ones, too.
Lighting
Too dark can make reading a challenge, and bright direct sunlight can hurt your eyes, also making reading a challenge.
Smell
No one wants to do activities with a full garbage can on a hot day. Additionally, scents are powerful triggers for memories and emotions. The right scent can get us into the right mindset.
Sound
Some people find loud street noises soothing, some prefer silence, some want music or the TV, while others prefer white noise, brown noise or the sound of rain.
I recently discovered that I hate gardening in my front yard because of the street noise - I wish I had been more aware of this before I was halfway through my landscaping project. I probably wouldn’t have been so ambitious.
Ergonomics of furniture or placement of items
Everything should support natural positioning and movement of your body.
High heel shoes shift a person’s weight on less than half of their foot and change how they walk. This puts unnatural strain on the body, leading to short-term pain, and long-term issues with prolonged wear. My compromise is to wear them occasionally.
Cleanliness
Dusty, moldy, or sticky surfaces can cause a trigger a disgust response that prevents us from fully relaxing or focussing on a task.
Safety
It’s impossible to feel comfortable if you have any reason to feel unsafe - for example being up high when you are mildly afraid of heights may cause unconscious stress and loss of focus.
Interior Design Elements
The harmony or disharmony of colors, shapes, and textures in a space can either help our brain relax and focus or trigger anxiety.
Too many things at the same time and in the same place.
The Amount of Activities Happening In That Location
No one will feel comfortable cooking in a kitchen when there’s a toddler playing on the floor in front of the stove, a teenager doing homework on the counter directly to the right, a partner watching TV while washing dishes, and a dog begging for a treat at their feet. None of these activities are a problem but where they are taking place, in combination with when they are happening, is.
Every Problem Has a Reason
My trash dilemma definitely conflicted with my need for comfort.
After working a 10-hour day, walking up and down those steps was painful, especially if I had to hold both heavy bags at once. Often it was too cold or too hot to spend that much time outside. During the colder months It would be dark by the time we got home, so going down the steps didn’t feel as safe.
Just considering comfort alone, it makes perfect sense that we would struggle to take the trash out on demand.
What is going on in your house?
Think about something you have been meaning to do - something you’ve been putting off.
Do any of the comfort-related factors answer why you might be struggling with it?
If not, perhaps it’s a matter of convenience.
Convenience
Convenience is a matter of practicality, and we’re more likely to think about it because it directly results in efficiency. I often find that people focus on the convenience of chore activities, neglecting how important it is for desirable activities, as well.
Your passions deserve to be convenient, too.
Everyone wants a convenient kitchen - but not as many people put energy into making the spaces they play guitar, paint a landscape, or read their novel convenient. Of course, convenience means ease of access, ease of use, AND ease of storage (aka putting it away.) If it’s convenient, it’s more likely to be done. If it’s not convenient, it’s more likely not to be done.
Here are some factors that determine convenience - with examples:
Location and position of activity zone.
Click the link to redirect to my prior blog post on activity zones.
Any parent who worked from home during the shutdown knows that a kid’s toy zone is inconvenient if it overlaps with a home office zone - especially if they both are used at the same time.
Location and position of needed items:
Distance: Items that are needed for the activity should be kept as close to that zone as possible and as close as comfortable… a goldilocks zone, for lack of a better word.
Visibility: Ideally, the things you need should be visible from where you are when you need them. Pliers on a hook in front of you are more convenient than ones in a drawer.
Consistency: If they can’t be visible for whatever reason, or you struggle with visual clutter, items should be in a very consistent place. Pliers in a drawer should always have the exact same position in the drawer. Label where they go if necessary.
Accessibility: getting an item should not be a physical challenge, every bend, twist, stretch or lift your body has to make to get the item should be counted against how accessible it is. Also, any items you have to move to find the thing you need counts against accessibility.
Quality of all materials
If the item or what you use for its storage is easily breakable and/or needs frequent maintenance it’s not convenient.
A Matter of Convenience
What factors related to convenience are affecting your ability to do the thing you’ve been putting off?
If it’s not comfort or convenience, there are definitely other factors at play.
Question The Negative Self-Talk
Our culture wants to label people who “put off” chores as lazy. Don’t buy into this. No one enjoys letting stressful activities pile up.
People need chores to be as comfortable, easy, quick, and anxiety free to a degree that increases with the difficulty of the rest of their lives.
If you were struggling to swim through rough water, would you refuse a life preserver just because you thought you could make it without drowning?
Who are we to judge the person who can’t wash the dishes because they have a migraine, or the person who has to choose between getting her kids’ teeth brushed before school in the morning or putting stamps on the bills.
People do what they can do, under the circumstances they currently face. Circumstances which are often invisible to outside world.
I am a professional organizer, not a therapist or doctor… but I can tell you if you are struggling with your mental and/or physical health, you deserve help.
Problems Often Have More Than One Reason
Inconvenience was the most glaring problem I faced when dealing with my 42-step trash issue.
My favorite thing about our current home is that it’s on street level. The trash issue was so haunting that our bins live in our attached garage. This reduced my trash activity zone range from 105 vertical feet to around eight feet, level.
To top it off, everything needed for the trash zone is indoors, so no issues with light or weather. The only thing we have to take into account is managing the garbage smell, which isn’t as much of an issue because it doesn’t get as hot here.
Needless to say, I don’t struggle with taking the trash out anymore. So, what I had considered an issue of laziness was actually an issue of the circumstances being too challenging for my lifestyle.
Why Everyone’s Comfort and Convenience Matter.
Increasing your comfort and the convenience of the activities you do will result in:
Better productivity:
You will want to work longer if what you are doing is comfortable and you are making progress quickly.
A Safer Environment:
Being comfortable reduces strain on your body, allowing you greater focus, helping you to avoid mistakes - potentially dangerous ones.
When things are convenient you don’t need to think as much about every action, saving more brain power for focusing on the task at hand.
Stress Reduction:
Reduced physical and mental strain allow you to relax into your task.
When tasks are convenient and comfortable they are more likely to get done on time, tasks done in a timely manner cause less stress.
Relationships with family or housemates may improve with fewer tasks left incomplete and tasks being less burdensome.
System Sustainability:
The easier something is to maintain the more likely it will be maintained. If you store your clean socks in the shed outside (I’ll assume it’s for a brilliant reason) and you don’t get dressed there, you will need some next-level good ideas to make it convenient and comfortable to take the clean socks out there on laundry day and and again every time you get dressed. More than likely, your socks will end up in some in between place, breaking the system.
It’s Not Just YOUR Comfort and Convenience that Matter
In my last blog post, I wrote about the overlapping activity zones in our bathroom. The zones overlapped each other in both time and space.
I tried to make this work by getting into the bathroom considerably earlier, but this wasn’t sustainable - it was very early, very dark, and very cold, there was a much more comfortable place I could be during that time. So, naturally, my bathroom time started to encroach on my partner’s.
If you read that post you know that eventually, I moved my makeup out of the bathroom, which removed that time overlap. It didn’t happen overnight because it wasn’t as inconvenient for me as it was for my partner. The pressure to change my zone was limited because of other factors, primarily my need for lighting and access to water.
My partner has also been taught to undervalue his own need for convenience and comfort, so I had to read between the lines.
Basically, he would hover around the bathroom silently, which caused a lot of ambient stress, so I would start rushing.
I finally gave up on keeping my hair and makeup zone together. I could improve the lighting in the bedroom, so the makeup zone went there. Unfortunately, there was no way I was getting running water in the bedroom, so my hair zone would have to stay.
Not perfect, but a decent compromise.
You Must Compromise Between Your Needs and Your Housemates’
Evidently, these birds are not compromising.
If my partner had been a different person we would have been bickering every morning, long before I thought about moving my things out of the bathroom.
A different scenario at our house involves the TV. Not my favorite part of the house, but that’s neither here nor there.
Here are some factors at play:
an awkwardly large living room.
children that need to make noise to feel comfortable
an adult that needs to sit against a wall because unpredictable noise stresses them out (it’s me, btw)
A different adult who wants to be close to the TV when playing games.
These factors mean the couch has to be placed against the wall, it also means that the couch is too far from the TV, which means that the other adult will roll a massive bean bag chair (it's literally 95lbs) in front of the TV, fully blocking the couch. The effort of rolling the bean bag back every time is too inconvenient, so the living room has a 7-foot diameter bean bag chair in place of a coffee table about 60% of the time.
Not my favorite floor plan. So, my partner and I moved the couch closer to the TV.
I assumed I would have children using the space behind the couch as a race track, their feet pounding on the floor behind me as they screaming at unpredictable intervals. I was ready to take up residence in the beanbag chair in the far corner, despite the fact that it’s the kids’ favorite trampoline. Thankfully, however, the kids have grown up since the last time we had this configuration. Though they still make strange and disturbing noises at all sorts of volumes and walk around the house like Godzilla, they aren’t doing so behind the couch.
My ideal setup does not involve a TV or indoor screaming… but, I pick my battles. My house doesn’t just serve my needs, it serves the needs of everyone living in it. Living together means communication and compromise, it means figuring out whose needs are greater in each area… sometimes those greater needs are mine, sometimes they are my partner’s, but often they are our kids’.
Next Time
In my next post, I’ll walk you through how I use the comfort and convenience factors to figure out where to put a new activity zone and what to put in it.
