I have ADHD so I'm constantly having to refactor the way I place items around my house because, if I don't, nothing will be placed correctly and no tasks will get done! For example, placing hanging hooks right by the back door so that it's easier for me to put away shopping bags when I get home, or removing cabinet doors so that I can place items back in their spot without the extra step of opening the cabinet.
The book "Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD" has lots more refactoring tips for reducing organization and cleaning in the home to the least amount of steps for those of us who have a difficulty with mukti-step processes.
This feels a lot like all the Montessori advice for making it easy for kids to take responsibility in the home. What I like about both kinds of advice is that they're about making care for yourself and your environment part of the built logic of your home.
Holly Pierlot also addresses this a little in her Mother’s Rule of Life - that nothing in your house should be hard to access when you need it, so no cookbooks or bath towels in the bedroom, for example. It’s really changed the way I look at “storage”
And, kind of like Montessori, when my kids were small I set up the house to be completely kid-friendly. Everything was child-proofed safety-wise, but also there was an unlocked cabinet with pots and containers they could play in, there were only things they were allowed to touch anywhere they could reach. It took a lot of up-front time, but in the long run saved me a lot of time and worry (I had four in four years).
Your article is spot on about the need to refactor code often and how that idea applies to everyday life as well.
There is also a term for what happens when you avoid refactoring and other forms of maintenance too long - "technical debt". Just like real debt, you have to pay interest on it, in the form of it taking more and more time to keep it working or make improvements. As more temporary hacks are added to keep it afloat, it gets harder and harder to refactor even though you need it more.
I think about this all the time. If I don't do the dishes now, I'm not merely procrastinating. I won't have time to clean and make breakfast tomorrow morning which will start a whole chain of events. And I will still have dishes to do later. Speaking of which...
This is entirely true of household stuff! There's actually a hilarious kid's book called "The Man Who Never Washed His Dishes." My kids love its whimsicality.
This post caught my eye - I'm a programmer-turned-researcher asking how to think about a "theology of computing." I immediately thought of the people that surround some of the most fundamental open-source programs (which are as important as physical infrastructure at this point). Their mythos leans towards a steadiness and a sense of the idiosyncrasies of the machine in their care (or rather, it is the people who use this machine that are in their care).
What this also highlights, being such an extreme example of refactoring, is how relational that job is. A lighthouse-keeper alone is just shooting photons out into the fog, but (presumably) the lights are a literal life-saver for the ships. It's tempting to brush over the maintaner as "part of the infrastructure," but one of the strangest beauties of infrastructure is its relationality (albeit reduced and often intentionally hidden).
Jun 27, 2023·edited Jun 27, 2023Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant
My favorite poem about maintenance is probably Richard Wilbur's "For C.," which contrasts the drama of flings and star-crossed lovers with the under-the-surface strength of steadfast lovers' devotion. When the speaker says at the end that long love "has the quality of something made," he compares it to two things that are manmade, but also two that are God-made. Here's the poem:
Jun 26, 2023·edited Jun 26, 2023Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant
I've often wished for more working songs, i.e. songs to sing either alone or in a group, while working either in or out of the home, that fit the content and rhythm of the work.
I think such songs used to exist. Much of what remains is either sea chanties or songs by enslaved or imprisoned workers, but there must have been more genres in the past.
Where are the songs for unloading trucks, which I've been employed to do? Where are the songs for sweeping the floor, which my 5yo and I do regularly? At least there are now many kids' songs for picking up toys.
I have a playlist of Sacred Harp, gospel hymns, church-camp-fire type songs that feel this way for me. They’re not *about* the work per se, but they’re the right tempo.
Flagged this in my inbox to return to it because Ive always wanted to think through this. I was reading the replies and I find refactoring to be an interesting framework for this kind of work. I also have some apprehension around Federico's wages for housework model. Have we done a post on Wages for housework? Please link me to it if I missed it! As it stands for our society right now most labor often categorized as "womens work is either unpaid and occurs outside of the market or is assigned a value by the market far lower than its actual value. I do hesitate in thinking about *if* a monetary value could be arrived at for this work and I certainly distrust the market in determining that number (it's currently settled on close to minimum wage!) But if this work cannot be valued monetarily by the market I wonder what our solutions are towards correcting the way we currently see this work as having little value and being of low status. I have felt this acutely in transitioning towards doing the lions share of childcare after my daughter was born. The lowered status assigned to me is evident in many interactions "Im JUST a mom now" or "Oh it must be SO nice not to work" and I think status is a strong incentive for the choices people make and incentives structure our society. Louise Perry recently shared an article discussing how she sees a new kind of feminism emerging which makes motherhood and the work unique to women high status but she does not really offer how we could do that or how that would come to be. It seems like a significantly uphill battle and taking money off the table seems like it would only add to the incline.
Ty! Gonna read through this post now and look forward to you returning to it. I would love your take on how to value and elevate the status of motherhood if we exclude monetary values as a means to do so!
I homeschool and it is a constant project of “refactoring.” What does this particular child need right now? What is creating a barrier to them learning (handwriting, multiplication, what have you). I do follow a curriculum but I try to pull out what each child actually needs from it; rather than apply it mechanically. Very challenging! But good work.
Actual refactoring comment: my primary skill professionally is writing/editing, in which there can of course be a lot of refactoring work: trying out ideas that don't fly, fixing sentences to see if it makes them better and then fixing them back. But for me, the real refactoring is a hobby that no one gets to see: music composition. I don't have any formal training in it (though I learned classical piano and choral music for years), but every now and then I get an itch and need to get a tune down: sometimes themes for a movie score on an obscure George MacDonald story (a move which will certainly never be made!), or a motet on the Gospel (which is not customary set to music in either form of the Latin rite in the Catholic Church, so there goes that), or, most ambitiously, a musical of Beauty and the Beast (I mean, they already have a pretty good one, so ...). Anyway, like Alanna's sweaters in the closet, these things are primarily ways for me of living the process of composition with these beautiful things that end up being my earworms. Sure, it would be cool if they got performed some day, but writing them down and monkeying with the chord progressions in musescore is so much fun as it is.
Not a refactoring comment, but I loved to death the Jolien Boumkwo story. As someone who did ballet but was too tall and broad-shouldered to continue, I've always felt (even when I'm fit and not recovering from pregnancy/pregnant) that I have the "wrong" type of body. It was beautiful to read that and see the affirmation of what Boumkwo could do, and also the solidarity she had with the hurdlers.
Maintaining the culture of a home, or workplace, or organization requires constant maintenance. I think it was an episode of the Work Appropriate pod where someone said the most useful phrase was “We don’t do that here”. The moment you start to let inappropriate behaviors accrue (and stop washing the lamppost to extend Chesterton’s metaphor), the quicker the culture you’re striving for dissipates.
And in our changing world it’s not just maintenance required! As new challenges arise new systems need to be developed, new standards. The refactoring of the cultural system to accommodate change while being ‘the same’ - consistent and aligned and “home” - is a big undertaking.
My kiddo and I are currently traveling and there is sooo much refactoring happening to maintain (some) routines and norms while staying not-at-home. Part of the challenge is figuring out if something falls within home norms, travel norms or an “okay to let this slide today” category. Maybe I’m juggling multiple forked systems?
I program for my research almost every day, and the theme of refactoring is almost always present. I think that one of the things I learned when working on projects is that it's important to design systems in a way that is amenable to refactoring--e.g. writing functions in the most general way possible, if it can be done without over-complicating. If your system stays around for long enough, it will inevitably need refactoring. I've also grown to appreciate the value of starting a project in a particular way even though you know it will need to be refactored down the line; it's easy to get overwhelmed working on a project in its full generality and sometimes that just leads to indecision or procrastination.
To me, refactoring codebases feels pretty directly analogous to housekeeping. I'm always trying to have a system that uses the least waste, requires the least maintenance, and can be quickly converted to other uses when the need arises.
I like to try to maximize the efficiency of my oven use by baking more than one thing if I already have the oven on, working from lowest temperature to highest. And I’m always trying to figure out the best order of chores (if I cut up this first and then that, I don’t have to wash the cutting board; let’s do the messy activity now, since I’ll have to sweep anyway later).
I think the first ~year with a new baby is a constant adjusting or refactoring process. Everyone still has to eat and sleep and socialize, and the household chores still have to get done, but the way in which those things happen will necessarily evolve almost constantly over that year.
Systems engineering and software development have some conceptual models that apply quite well to home-work. I wonder what my engineering management professors would think about my kanban-ish system of pantry inventory/meal planning/grocery list making?
thank you so much for reading and engaging with my piece! it's been really interesting as I learn more and more about code to realize the resonances with other parts of my brain / identity / life, and you do a wonderful job touching on that here.
I don't think that housework should be monetized in any existing monetary system. I think there should be a world wide currency for "women's work" to be sure that the basic needs of humanity don't collapse when the made-up systems of capital fail. The reason that existing economies survive is because of the unpaid work that women and volunteers do because it has to be done. I think of it as "women's work" is the board of a board game that supports the economic game being played. The undermining of the essential biological survival work is an unfortunate aspect of the games male economies play.
As someone whose job involves quite a bit of coding, I am attached to thinking of engineering in general as a discipline. Best practices with software like “don’t repeat yourself”, agile approaches to project management, and test-driven development give us ideals to aim for that constitute the craft.
As for refactoring in particular, it is absolutely essential to maintaining any piece of code much as removing weeds is to gardening. The ideal here is that code quality is not just dependent on how well it executes the desired functionality today, but also how adaptable it is to changes that might come in the future.
Life, particularly in a family, is often quite similar. We don’t just optimize for the ideal scenario, but have to maintain flexibility to handle the unexpected.
Raising our daughter who turns six months old tomorrow, my wife and I could try to stick to rigid bedtimes and routines, but we also want her to be robust to inevitable disruptions to that schedule. So we bring her with us to dinner even if it might go past her usual bedtime, and she spends the night at her grandparents’ place every once in a while just to maintain that robustness.
I have ADHD so I'm constantly having to refactor the way I place items around my house because, if I don't, nothing will be placed correctly and no tasks will get done! For example, placing hanging hooks right by the back door so that it's easier for me to put away shopping bags when I get home, or removing cabinet doors so that I can place items back in their spot without the extra step of opening the cabinet.
The book "Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD" has lots more refactoring tips for reducing organization and cleaning in the home to the least amount of steps for those of us who have a difficulty with mukti-step processes.
This feels a lot like all the Montessori advice for making it easy for kids to take responsibility in the home. What I like about both kinds of advice is that they're about making care for yourself and your environment part of the built logic of your home.
Holly Pierlot also addresses this a little in her Mother’s Rule of Life - that nothing in your house should be hard to access when you need it, so no cookbooks or bath towels in the bedroom, for example. It’s really changed the way I look at “storage”
I love this book.
And, kind of like Montessori, when my kids were small I set up the house to be completely kid-friendly. Everything was child-proofed safety-wise, but also there was an unlocked cabinet with pots and containers they could play in, there were only things they were allowed to touch anywhere they could reach. It took a lot of up-front time, but in the long run saved me a lot of time and worry (I had four in four years).
You are definitely not the only person to takes pride in figuring out the "right"/most effective sequence for measuring spoon usage. I do that too :)
Spoon use sisterhood!
I didn’t know other people did this too!
I do it, intentionally, when I'm baking. Get a recipe down to the barest minimum of dishes. (We don't have a dishwasher.)
Us neither
Same!
Your article is spot on about the need to refactor code often and how that idea applies to everyday life as well.
There is also a term for what happens when you avoid refactoring and other forms of maintenance too long - "technical debt". Just like real debt, you have to pay interest on it, in the form of it taking more and more time to keep it working or make improvements. As more temporary hacks are added to keep it afloat, it gets harder and harder to refactor even though you need it more.
I think about this all the time. If I don't do the dishes now, I'm not merely procrastinating. I won't have time to clean and make breakfast tomorrow morning which will start a whole chain of events. And I will still have dishes to do later. Speaking of which...
This is entirely true of household stuff! There's actually a hilarious kid's book called "The Man Who Never Washed His Dishes." My kids love its whimsicality.
Oooh!
This post caught my eye - I'm a programmer-turned-researcher asking how to think about a "theology of computing." I immediately thought of the people that surround some of the most fundamental open-source programs (which are as important as physical infrastructure at this point). Their mythos leans towards a steadiness and a sense of the idiosyncrasies of the machine in their care (or rather, it is the people who use this machine that are in their care).
What this also highlights, being such an extreme example of refactoring, is how relational that job is. A lighthouse-keeper alone is just shooting photons out into the fog, but (presumably) the lights are a literal life-saver for the ships. It's tempting to brush over the maintaner as "part of the infrastructure," but one of the strangest beauties of infrastructure is its relationality (albeit reduced and often intentionally hidden).
My favorite poem about maintenance is probably Richard Wilbur's "For C.," which contrasts the drama of flings and star-crossed lovers with the under-the-surface strength of steadfast lovers' devotion. When the speaker says at the end that long love "has the quality of something made," he compares it to two things that are manmade, but also two that are God-made. Here's the poem:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43036/for-c
I've often wished for more working songs, i.e. songs to sing either alone or in a group, while working either in or out of the home, that fit the content and rhythm of the work.
I think such songs used to exist. Much of what remains is either sea chanties or songs by enslaved or imprisoned workers, but there must have been more genres in the past.
Where are the songs for unloading trucks, which I've been employed to do? Where are the songs for sweeping the floor, which my 5yo and I do regularly? At least there are now many kids' songs for picking up toys.
I have a playlist of Sacred Harp, gospel hymns, church-camp-fire type songs that feel this way for me. They’re not *about* the work per se, but they’re the right tempo.
Flagged this in my inbox to return to it because Ive always wanted to think through this. I was reading the replies and I find refactoring to be an interesting framework for this kind of work. I also have some apprehension around Federico's wages for housework model. Have we done a post on Wages for housework? Please link me to it if I missed it! As it stands for our society right now most labor often categorized as "womens work is either unpaid and occurs outside of the market or is assigned a value by the market far lower than its actual value. I do hesitate in thinking about *if* a monetary value could be arrived at for this work and I certainly distrust the market in determining that number (it's currently settled on close to minimum wage!) But if this work cannot be valued monetarily by the market I wonder what our solutions are towards correcting the way we currently see this work as having little value and being of low status. I have felt this acutely in transitioning towards doing the lions share of childcare after my daughter was born. The lowered status assigned to me is evident in many interactions "Im JUST a mom now" or "Oh it must be SO nice not to work" and I think status is a strong incentive for the choices people make and incentives structure our society. Louise Perry recently shared an article discussing how she sees a new kind of feminism emerging which makes motherhood and the work unique to women high status but she does not really offer how we could do that or how that would come to be. It seems like a significantly uphill battle and taking money off the table seems like it would only add to the incline.
Wages for Housework is something I've touched on here (https://otherfeminisms.substack.com/p/is-money-the-only-way-to-value-care) but definitely plan to return to.
Ty! Gonna read through this post now and look forward to you returning to it. I would love your take on how to value and elevate the status of motherhood if we exclude monetary values as a means to do so!
I homeschool and it is a constant project of “refactoring.” What does this particular child need right now? What is creating a barrier to them learning (handwriting, multiplication, what have you). I do follow a curriculum but I try to pull out what each child actually needs from it; rather than apply it mechanically. Very challenging! But good work.
Yes, all the happiest homeschoolers I know (incl. my MIL) say they take it one child and one year at a time.
Actual refactoring comment: my primary skill professionally is writing/editing, in which there can of course be a lot of refactoring work: trying out ideas that don't fly, fixing sentences to see if it makes them better and then fixing them back. But for me, the real refactoring is a hobby that no one gets to see: music composition. I don't have any formal training in it (though I learned classical piano and choral music for years), but every now and then I get an itch and need to get a tune down: sometimes themes for a movie score on an obscure George MacDonald story (a move which will certainly never be made!), or a motet on the Gospel (which is not customary set to music in either form of the Latin rite in the Catholic Church, so there goes that), or, most ambitiously, a musical of Beauty and the Beast (I mean, they already have a pretty good one, so ...). Anyway, like Alanna's sweaters in the closet, these things are primarily ways for me of living the process of composition with these beautiful things that end up being my earworms. Sure, it would be cool if they got performed some day, but writing them down and monkeying with the chord progressions in musescore is so much fun as it is.
Not a refactoring comment, but I loved to death the Jolien Boumkwo story. As someone who did ballet but was too tall and broad-shouldered to continue, I've always felt (even when I'm fit and not recovering from pregnancy/pregnant) that I have the "wrong" type of body. It was beautiful to read that and see the affirmation of what Boumkwo could do, and also the solidarity she had with the hurdlers.
Maintaining the culture of a home, or workplace, or organization requires constant maintenance. I think it was an episode of the Work Appropriate pod where someone said the most useful phrase was “We don’t do that here”. The moment you start to let inappropriate behaviors accrue (and stop washing the lamppost to extend Chesterton’s metaphor), the quicker the culture you’re striving for dissipates.
And in our changing world it’s not just maintenance required! As new challenges arise new systems need to be developed, new standards. The refactoring of the cultural system to accommodate change while being ‘the same’ - consistent and aligned and “home” - is a big undertaking.
My kiddo and I are currently traveling and there is sooo much refactoring happening to maintain (some) routines and norms while staying not-at-home. Part of the challenge is figuring out if something falls within home norms, travel norms or an “okay to let this slide today” category. Maybe I’m juggling multiple forked systems?
I program for my research almost every day, and the theme of refactoring is almost always present. I think that one of the things I learned when working on projects is that it's important to design systems in a way that is amenable to refactoring--e.g. writing functions in the most general way possible, if it can be done without over-complicating. If your system stays around for long enough, it will inevitably need refactoring. I've also grown to appreciate the value of starting a project in a particular way even though you know it will need to be refactored down the line; it's easy to get overwhelmed working on a project in its full generality and sometimes that just leads to indecision or procrastination.
To me, refactoring codebases feels pretty directly analogous to housekeeping. I'm always trying to have a system that uses the least waste, requires the least maintenance, and can be quickly converted to other uses when the need arises.
I like to try to maximize the efficiency of my oven use by baking more than one thing if I already have the oven on, working from lowest temperature to highest. And I’m always trying to figure out the best order of chores (if I cut up this first and then that, I don’t have to wash the cutting board; let’s do the messy activity now, since I’ll have to sweep anyway later).
I think the first ~year with a new baby is a constant adjusting or refactoring process. Everyone still has to eat and sleep and socialize, and the household chores still have to get done, but the way in which those things happen will necessarily evolve almost constantly over that year.
Systems engineering and software development have some conceptual models that apply quite well to home-work. I wonder what my engineering management professors would think about my kanban-ish system of pantry inventory/meal planning/grocery list making?
Also, re: potty training, I think I’m going to blow a gasket if I have to answer “Why don’t people use the litter box?” one more time. Haha.
thank you so much for reading and engaging with my piece! it's been really interesting as I learn more and more about code to realize the resonances with other parts of my brain / identity / life, and you do a wonderful job touching on that here.
I don't think that housework should be monetized in any existing monetary system. I think there should be a world wide currency for "women's work" to be sure that the basic needs of humanity don't collapse when the made-up systems of capital fail. The reason that existing economies survive is because of the unpaid work that women and volunteers do because it has to be done. I think of it as "women's work" is the board of a board game that supports the economic game being played. The undermining of the essential biological survival work is an unfortunate aspect of the games male economies play.
As someone whose job involves quite a bit of coding, I am attached to thinking of engineering in general as a discipline. Best practices with software like “don’t repeat yourself”, agile approaches to project management, and test-driven development give us ideals to aim for that constitute the craft.
As for refactoring in particular, it is absolutely essential to maintaining any piece of code much as removing weeds is to gardening. The ideal here is that code quality is not just dependent on how well it executes the desired functionality today, but also how adaptable it is to changes that might come in the future.
Life, particularly in a family, is often quite similar. We don’t just optimize for the ideal scenario, but have to maintain flexibility to handle the unexpected.
Raising our daughter who turns six months old tomorrow, my wife and I could try to stick to rigid bedtimes and routines, but we also want her to be robust to inevitable disruptions to that schedule. So we bring her with us to dinner even if it might go past her usual bedtime, and she spends the night at her grandparents’ place every once in a while just to maintain that robustness.