For the first five years that my wife and I had cats, I cleaned the litter a grand total of—I don’t know, let’s say about 100 times. That sounds like a lot until you consider that cleaning the cat litter is one of those nasty little chores that you have to do every single day. Skip a day of litter-cleaning, and you’re only creating trouble for future you.
So when my wife learned she was pregnant, she had a fun piece of news for me:
You have to do it now. I can’t risk getting toxoplasmosis.
If you’re confused, follow that Wikipedia link and all will be explained. I won’t bother with the pregnancy risks of cleaning cat litter; I want to (selfishly) focus instead on the unexpected burden of a new daily chore that I’d effectively offloaded for years to my patient partner.
So: a new chore. What are we to do with that?
Most of the time, I would forget all about the litter until right before feeding the cats their dinner.
For reasons that aren’t worth getting into, we feed our cats right before we ourselves go to bed—around 10 p.m. most nights.
That means that the typical day ends with me being meowed at by the cats (“feed me! feed me! feed me!”), remembering that I need to clean the cat litter, slouching down to the basement, and scooping poop and sodden wheaty chunks of urine.
It’s not the greatest.
If you asked James Clear—my wife is reading Atomic Habits, so he’s been on my mind—he might offer that it’s at least a good example of habit-stacking that I’ve developed. Feed cats? Also clean their litter!
Except for, well, like I said—it’s not the greatest way to close our a day.
Knowing that the peak-end rule applies to singular experiences, it still felt applicable here. Why was I taking such a critical moment of my day—every one of my days!—and closing it out with such a shoddy moment?
So: I’ve taken a new tack. It still makes me unhappy, because cleaning litter is a miserable little chore. Here’s the gist: any time I go down to the basement, I must clean the litter if I haven’t yet done so that day. No exceptions. It elicits an internal groan when I realize what I’ve done…but it’s better to do smack in the middle of the day than saving it (as if it were worth savoring) for the day’s end.
Taylor Coe 