Unf*ck Your Habitat: You're Better Than Your Mess

by Rachel Hoffman

Learning that progress is incremental and not necessarily flawless can be a huge step toward getting a messy house under control, a little bit at a time.

How often have you heard “Cleanliness is next to godliness”? That seems a little extreme, doesn’t it? Cleanliness, not kindness or compassion? That’s ridiculous, right? But the fact remains that so many people see someone who’s messy and make all sorts of assumptions about that person—about their life, about their personality, about their ethics, even about their worth. We need to learn to separate the state of our homes from our feelings of worth. Having a clean home doesn’t make you a better person.

the value in a task isn’t necessarily in its completion, but in the very undertaking of it,

Unmade beds are agents of entropy; they’re only going to get worse. First the bedding is in disarray. Then laundry starts to pile up on it. Then there’s so much other stuff on it that there’s no room to sleep unless you toss everything on the floor. Sometime later, you realize you can’t remember when you last washed your sheets. Taking a minute to make your bed immediately snaps some order into the chaos.

Doing twenty minutes’ worth of work before bed can save you endless aggravation in the morning. Remember, Future You will appreciate whatever Right Now You manages to do to make life a little easier.

Photodocumenting the process is a great way to give yourself a little bit of distance from all of the difficult stuff you’re working through, and it turns the whole process into more of an anthropological study and less of a self-criticism.