I get distracted when I leave the kitchen, so doing the dishes while waiting until the next cooking step is done fixes two problems for me: 1) I get less mess afterwards, 2) less destroyed food because I left the kitchen and forgot to check it.

Hang on, if you're washing dishes before you are done cooking and long before you even set the table or start eating anything, what exactly is it that you are washing? One big knife and a chopping board? How did this become the standard advice?

What you're supposed to do is get your MISE EN PLACE, that means get your shit ready, prep all the ingredients, mince and dice whatever and get them into prep bowls, and then start cooking when everything is actually ready to be cooked.

If you want to do dishes while you're cooking,

the cooking is passive

adjust the heat, dawg, nothing should be burning in the 2-3 minutes it takes between stirring to wash something. If it is, you're cooking it too hot

Big batch of meal soup chiming in.

That's a lot of hollandaise sauce, boss.

My flat doesn't really have space for a dishwasher :(

When I move out I'm for sure gonna bump it up the priority list, but that won't be anytime soon

Do some dishes while you're cooking.

Making a meal falls into three parts: prep, cook, and clean. I used to hate the 'boring, standing on my aching feet' prep bit, so I'd try to fit the prep into the little gaps in cooking. Of course, 8 couldn't do it and I had to keep adjusting things - taking something off heat/down heat, whatever - to finish the prep for the next stage. The constant adjustments made the food not as good, the cooking unnecessarily stressful, and left me exhausted with a sink full of dishes at the end.

Nowadays, I sit in front of the tv. I do my prep there, all the peeling and chopping and slicing and dicing. When I cook, everything is ready for me to add to the dish, so the food tastes better and cooking itself is much less stressful. And I use the little bits of spare time during cooking to rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. When I'm done cooking, I only have the last handful of things to put in the dishwasher, plus whatever plates from the meal itself.

My life is much easier, all because I now watch TV.

The only time I need to do dishes after cooking is when I am cooking something that needs constant attention, too many things at once, orI’m just lazy

Usually I just have the skillet I cooked in and the plate/silverware I used

Well yeah. Unless you're using disposable plates, you're going to still have to do dishes. Fewer, but still.

But you can reduce that with things like a slow cooker, and one pot meals.

When you put it like that, being an adult is so fun!

Even if it does take 2 hours start to finish, I have to imagine there's at least SOME part of the recipe that involves waiting for something to cook. That's dishwashing time right there.

With leftovers most meals take a couple minutes!

What meals do you cook?

Try cooking a whole chicken a 700°C for 30 minutes and see what happens.

Yeah, honestly. It's a crap meme. Maybe it feels like 2 hours because its boring for you. If you cook for 2 hours likely one part of it is putting something into the oven for 1 1/2 hours.