...all of which clarifies my belief that habit formation isn't about motivation and will power. It's about making the path to the habit as easy as humanly possible--to make motivation and willpower LESS necessary.
In the dish-habit scenario, there are lots of actions to reduce the risk of a level of "dish overwhelm" that will require a too-high level of motivation. Some are designed to make the initial push (Dish Frenzy!) as easy as possible. Some (paper plates and the second Saturday afternoon) are designed to minimize the damage of habit slips, so that if you slip you aren't right back where you started. And some are planned for a specific period of time, on the theory that after two weeks the habit might be sufficiently well established to tolerate a little more challenge--the chaos after making chicken fried steak, for example.
This is not entirely unlike the way that my father broke his smoking habit, a million years ago.
He got bags and bags of individually wrapped candies, keeping them everywhere, so that he had a substitute habit for his hands and his mouth at those times when he used to sit back and light a cigarette. They were bitter chewy candy--strong licorice, for example--because...OK, not sure, but that bitterness was part of his plan, as was the fact that he could start and finish a candy fairly quickly, and then reach for another one. He drank a ton of coffee to have something hot in his mouth, and when he could't take any more coffee, he drank hot water. And he forbid himself to make any substantial life decisions for several months, because he made those decisions by walking and smoking while he thought about his options.