Since we're finally getting closer and closer to the end of the season, having only a few more days to go, we finally begin taking care of the final task that we have to do before closing the restaurant - cleaning.
When I say cleaning I don't mean just a little bit of cleanup before closing, such as removing the dust and sweeping the floors. When it comes to restaurants, cleaning is taken seriously, at least if you're in a place where people respect that. If you work only during seasons, at the end of the season the "big cleanup" will eventually come, where you have to take pretty much everything out and clean every single possible inch.
A lot of people hate this part, both because it's something completely different from what they usually have to do but also because it's fairly hard to take every single item from the entire building and clean it, moving grills and tables and cabinets and cleaning behind everything.
It can be annoying, difficult, and it can take several days.
For the past few days me and two other people have been busy cleaning the cellar, which is where we store pretty much everything, and also were the walk-in fridges are. We removed every item from every shelf so we can properly clean, we washed the walls, the tables and what was behind them, and we even finishing cleaning both fridges, top to bottom. Now all we have to do is wait a few more days until the season ends and we can begin cleaning the restaurant itself and the kitchen.
One thing I noticed whenever having to begin cleaning was the fact that almost everyone thought that the work will take much longer than anything we normally do. Everyone expects cleaning to be the hardest and most time consuming part from our job. This makes a lot of people procrastinate and stretch the entire process for way too long because "it takes time to clean everything".
Something I discovered these past few days is that the process will take too much time indeed, but only if you allow it to. Cleaning is not that bad. If you know how to do it, you can be done with it fairly quickly. But because we are so bad at estimating we sometimes think that we'll spend hours on something that will only take 30 minutes.
I noticed this today after almost being done with the second fridge. We had an entire metal shelf to clean, after being done with everything else, and no one really wanted to take care of it. Everyone thought it would be a much better idea to just let it outside and clean it in the evening. That wasn't something I wanted to do. Why prolong something that you can be done with in half an hour?
So, I took a small bucket, filled it with water and added some cleaning solution, went to the metal shelf and began cleaning it. I think I was done in around 20 minutes. So, instead of waiting hours before beginning the task because "oh it sucks so much and it's gonna take so long", I just began doing it and finished the work way faster than anyone thought it would take.
I'm guilty if such bad estimations as well. There's a lot of cases in which I think that a certain task will take me too long to finish, but once I begin taking care of it I realize that I was wrong. This is why I think it's important to accept that sometimes we have no idea how long something will take, so it might be a good idea to just begin doing what must be done as quickly as possible. We'll finish when we'll finish, but it's much better than to procrastinate and being right about the time required to finish the task simply because you spent most of that time worrying and not actually doing anything.
