Does anyone else have this habit? / The kitchen is getting cluttered with coffee mugs and I just can't bring myself to wash them right now. Anyone else procrastinate on basic chores until they become overwhelming or do you have a system that works fo

Opening thread commentary.

I have this exact same problem and there are days where the sink is literally full of mugs that I can see but my brain has decided they don't exist today which is so frustrating because then it becomes a mountain instead of five minutes of work and you never know how long you want to do nothing until something explodes — oh man speaking of things exploding, remember when we had that disastrous camping trip in the Adirondacks where it rained for three days straight and my tent flooded while I was trying to make coffee which is actually hilarious now because everything went wrong including the stove breaking which meant we ate cold oats for breakfast and by day two everyone was so irritable that someone started crying about their car insurance policy out of nowhere. Anyway, a system that helps me sometimes is the five-minute rule where you tell yourself you'll just do one mug or just rinse them which trickles into doing all of them because once you start it becomes momentum rather than this massive mountain feeling but on my worse days even that feels like too much and then I have to accept that today is a low-energy day and come back at it tomorrow instead of beating myself up for being tired.

Totally feel this -- my kitchen counter is literally a graveyard of coffee mugs right now and every time I see them it adds to that overwhelmed feeling which then makes me want to avoid them even more. The "technical term" thing is real too, executive dysfunction isn't just being lazy or tired sometimes it's like your brain can't figure out how to break the task down into steps

This is so me and it genuinely makes me want to cry a little bit because there are literally six mugs on my counter right now that I've been staring at for three days like they're ancient artifacts instead of dishes, which is insane when you think about how much effort putting them in the dishwasher takes vs just doing it but here we are and this is what executive dysfunction looks like — not being lazy, because laziness would be choosing to do nothing over doing something and I want to do the thing I literally can't make my hands move toward for some reason. My mom used to call me a hoarder when I was ten which wasn't helpful but it also made sense in its own way because there were like forty half-finished crafts around the house at any given time, and then one day I had this huge project where I had to organize all of my school supplies by subject color and every single marker cap that matched became a mini mission — oh wait this blue matches the navy so now I need to find another blue. That's what happens when your brain doesn't have a priority filter, everything is equally important so nothing gets done because you can't decide where to start first and then it becomes overwhelming and then you just sit there staring at the clutter while feeling like garbage for not being able to do something simple that other people find easy. I tried body doubling once which is basically having someone else in the room doing their own thing while you do your work, and it actually helped a little but now I have two cluttered rooms instead of one so that's also an option if anyone wants the specific system I used for my kitchen last spring before I got overwhelmed again.