Small Efforts Can Have Big Effects

Jack and I share a car, and it stays in a constant state of being in a bit of a mess.  I'd like to blame the fact that since we share the car, it doesn't get a lot of 'down' time - one of us is either using it, or we're spending time together.  But the reality is that 'cleaning the car' is on my mental to-do list, but it's near the bottom.  It's on of those things that will flit by in my mind and I'll think, 'Yeah, I'll do that.... tomorrow.'

Well, this Sunday I spent a couple of hours and really cleaned the snot out of that car!  I ran the floor mats through our washing machine twice, I used Q-tips to clean every nook and crevice, I vacuumed every surface in the car I could reach, and of course washed the outside of the car.

What struck me about all of this is that the rewards of doing this were WAY greater than I expected for such a relatively small effort.  Ok, yeah, instead of spending 7 minutes just picking up I spent about 2 hours doing a deep clean, but 2 hours is still a pretty small amount of time.  And for those 2 hours I really felt like I had accomplished something amazing.

I got a HUGE emotional payoff from doing something that had been kinda lingering on my mental to-do list.  I also got a HUGE emotional payoff from the satisfaction of finally having a clean car.

This just reminded me that sometimes, small efforts can have a pretty big effect :-)