1. If you have a dishwasher, develop thankfulness! Remind yourself how much less you'd like washing dishes if you had to do them by hand. Remind yourself that many women throughout the world wash all dishes by hand. Every. Single. Day. (If you don't have a dishwasher, take heart, and read on.)
2. Envision dish washing as a time for prayer. Or as prime time for contemplating Bible passages or memorizing Bible verses. Busying your brain with something else - especially something that's spiritually enriching - makes dish washing time fly by.
3. Try to reduce the number of dishes you use. For example, when you're cooking, instead of using a bowl, then tossing it in the sink, hand wash it and reuse it later in the cooking process. You might also consider how your family uses cups and glasses. At our house, I encourage my children to put their cups on the kitchen table (at their assigned seating spots) and re-use them throughout the day. You might even assign each family member a different color cup so they can more easily keep track of what's theirs. (Because if they can't find their cup - you guessed it! They are gonna go grab a fresh one from the cupboard. And yep, that means more dishes to wash.)
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| Be thankful. You could be doing dishes by hand. On the street. With no running water. Courtesy Steve Evan, Wikipedia. |
5. Hand wash what's left over. If you have a dishwasher, but not all the dishes fit into it, don't let the dishes sit in the sink. This just means the next time you run the dishwasher, you probably won't have room for them again. Hand washing those few dishes doesn't take long, and it's much more encouraging to see a clean sink.
6. Remove clean dishes from the dishwasher as soon as they are clean. It really takes very little time, and it makes the next point possible.
7. As you dirty dishes, put them in the dishwasher. This keeps the kitchen looking cleaner and breaks down the job of dish washing into shorter periods.
8. And if the dishwasher if full of clean dishes, by all means use those dishes, rather than dishes from the cupboard. It saves a step!
9. Time yourself. If you hate doing dishes, chances are you have an inflated idea of how long it takes to do them. If you time yourself and discover it only takes 8 minutes (for example) to do them, you're more likely to tackle washing dishes instead of putting them off.
10. Start teaching your children to do dishes as soon as possible. No, a five year old can't do dishes all by himself. But you can start teaching him how to put glasses and plates in the dishwasher, or how to dry and put away utensils. Eventually, your children will know an important life skill - and will be able to take over the chore of washing dishes. (Yay!)
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| Courtesy Granny Enchanted, Wikipedia. |
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