your gf smashed it with all the other stuff though  i personally find that when the kitchen is messy or in your gfs case tea shelf its hard to even comprehend how to clean through the noise of the visual stimuli the dread of the scope of the task and the frustration of the limited clean surface area on which to move things around  if shes annoyed at herself that she didnt get the dishes done it might be easier next time for her to consider each part of dishes as a mini task  unpack the dish washer   tea and cat time repack the dish washer   coffee and doughnuts stack dirty pots and pans   put on a podcastsome music fill sink and scrub the dishes   snack wipe dry dishes and wip surfaces   collapse from exhaustion  the difficulty is always resuming the intended task after the break but sometimes we do really need to manually reward ourselves for completing anything cos our brains are so stingy with the dopamine  sometimes i will think to myself tomorrow i need to clean the house but when i wake up in the morning i am unable to comprehend the scope of the task and that causes analysis paralysis so in those cases ive started asking my wife what are the things that need to be cleaned specifically in order of priority that way if i only get a few things done i know they were the right things to do