# Leaving Things Better Off

By Randall Degges · March 15, 2015 · https://rdegges.com/2015/leaving-things-better-off/

> An easy way to accomplish little wins throughout the day is to try and always leave things better off than they were before you got there.

![Robot Character Sketch][]


When Sami and I first got married (*almost 5 years ago, now!*), our biggest
source of marital frustration and unhappiness was chores.  More specifically:
the fact that I didn't do them.

Growing up, my mom always ran our household, and did everything for me and my
siblings: laundry, dishes, cleaning, cooking -- all of it.  After getting
married, I subconsciously expected the same.  So I did what I was used to doing:
nothing.

I'd avoid dirty dishes, let my laundry pile up for weeks, and before our first
month had ended, our brand new apartment was pretty disorganized.

To make things worse, I'm a bit of a clean freak, so this led to some hardcore
arguments between the two of us.  We'd both get upset with each other, or even
worse, try to *not get upset* with each other and let the problems continue.

After talking about things, we decided to split up duties a bit more evenly.
And while we've had various successes and failures over the years in this
regard, things are much better.

Around the time we both finally opened up and talked with each other about this
problem, I had just finished reading [The Joy of Less][] (*a good book on
minimalism*), and had some ideas of how to improve things.

One of the simplest ways I've found to improve problems like the one I was
having is to just *always leave things better off than they were before you found
them*.

To help with dishes, for instance, what I started doing was pretty basic: every
time I went to put something into the sink, I'd wash and put away two other
things in the sink.  This way, by the time I left the kitchen, the net dirty
dishes pile had decreased by 1.

Over time, I've found that this is by far the simplest and most effective method
to cleaning (*and life in general*) that helps to avoid big issues and
frustrating experiences.

Instead of dealing with big pile-up-problems in one sitting, it's a lot less
mentally and emotionally taxing to simply make things a little bit better when
you can.  An extra 30 seconds a few times a day is a lot less daunting than a
single, 3 hour cleaning experience.

What's really interesting, though, is when you apply this concept to other areas
of your life as well.

The next time you start adding a feature to your company codebase -- be on the
lookout for a way to positively improve code quality.  Maybe you could add in a
unit test, fix a typo in a variable name, or even do something small like
improve a comment or remove some trailing whitespace.

Over time, this sort of thing adds up and before long you'll have substantially
improved the code quality of your projects, with very little effort.

What I've learned over the years is that by really adopting the mindset of
*"leave things better off than they were before you found them"*, I don't only
tend to solve my existing problems, but I also prevent new ones entirely.

If you're currently dealing with a big problem, maybe the solution doesn't have
to be so hard: just make it a little bit less of a problem every day =)


[Robot Character Sketch]: robot-character-sketch.jpg "Robot Character Sketch"
  [The Joy of Less]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0984087311/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0984087311&linkCode=as2&tag=randdegg-20&linkId=PNLDD6DVTWQ66KG6 "The Joy of Less"