I’ve been spending a lot of time at home recently. I left my position at the “Global Empire” in July. So for the last two months, I’ve been spending a lot of time at home and alone–an experience I must say.

Rarely have I spent so much time by myself–this seeming hermithood has certainly been by choice, broken by many visits with friends and family (some would say interventions.) It has, however, been an experience of coming to know myself, my moods, my lethargy and my motivation.

To spur on that motivation, and escape the lethargy, I set out to make some lists of things to do. I find that there is a power in words; a control. If I feel overwhelmed by an aspect of my life, I write about it. Right now the overwhelming is the things that have piled-up, undone while I have been homebodying (like bunburying, only without the country house). So, I have tried to bring them under word-control by putting them down in a list.

The lists certainly worked from the mental control perspective, but in the act of writing them I was led in an interesting direction. Not being simply satisfied with writing them, I put them into an Excel spreadsheet which, in turn, led me to apply frequencies to repeating tasks. This is, I’m sure, already boring to anyone other than myself. But, I came to the question of how often should I do things like wash my sheets. I had thought conventional wisdom was for this particular task every two weeks at the very least. But a quick interrogation of Google suggests yet again that there is nothing common or conventional about sense or wisdom: everything from daily to monthly was the response of the Internet masses.

So my question to you is how often do you wash your sheets (or even how often do you feel you should? And for that matter how often do you do all the other mundane but important household maintenance tasks?