How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House's Dirty Little Secrets

by Dana K. White

Not all idealists are slobs, but most slobs are idealists.

Three words in that last paragraph are ones I now recognize as signal words: would, could, and should. Signals that it’s never going to happen. When those words are in my inner monologue, I have to ask myself, “But what will I do?

All the wouldas, couldas, and shouldas in the world don’t get my bathroom clean. Know what gets it clean? Cleaning it. (Seriously, the profundity in this book is amazing.)

Reality is accepting that while some people do things like this and earn decent chump change, selling my trash would be more trouble than it’s worth to me. And it would make my house even harder to maintain.

Methods don’t clean your house. You have to clean your house. While I’m reading about systems for doing laundry or researching the best way to keep my kitchen under control or asking my neighbor how often she mops her floors, my house is getting messier.

Here’s the thing: as a project lover, I like to finish stuff. I like to work hard and then step away, living the rest of my life with the memory of how awesome I was in that moment. Of the amazing results of my hard work. I like to finish and move on. Not much sticks in my craw like redoing something I did right the first time. But housework/home management/whatever you want to call it isn’t a project. It has no end.

Here’s what I had to accept: Cleaning my house is not a project. It’s a series of boring, mundane, repetitive tasks. The people whose homes are clean all the time do these boring, mundane, repetitive tasks.

So the goal becomes doing the dishes every day and preventing the project.

Once you have a well-practiced skill, it looks easy, but making something look easy takes a lot of hard work.

Here’s how I chose: I looked around my house and decided what made me the most anxious. Not anxious like who-put-that-cup-there-I-never-leave-cups-there anxious, but anxious like “How do other people not have this happen, but for me it’s a constant frustration?”

Solve your chosen problem today. Then, and this is the key, solve it again tomorrow, before it’s a problem again. Solve it when “solving” only involves a little straightening or a little shifting or one quick wipe with a cloth. Solve the same problem every day for seven days. After seven days, you’ll have tried multiple solutions, and one of them will work. That’s all that matters: finding what works in your home for your unique family.

Dirty Dishes Math still applies to handwashed dishes. Don’t wash dishes today, and tomorrow’s task will require six times more effort.

I can pick up a bad habit in three days flat and struggle for years to break it. A good habit, however, causes emotional angst and physical pain to create, but I can break it in less than twenty-four hours. So maybe it’s important to look at good and bad habits differently.

In the beginning of my own deslobification process, I called the things I was adding to my daily list nonnegotiable tasks.

At some point, I started calling these nonnegotiables daily tasks.

My point is for you to start looking for small ways you can remove worry, stress, and decision-making from your daily life.

What can you do to remove small stresses from your life? You can remove decisions about little things that don’t deserve daily brain space. When something registers as a recurring annoyance, try making a decision that will prevent it from being an irritation in the future.

When I turn daily stuff I should be doing into pre-made decisions, I accomplish the same purpose. By removing certain decisions from my daily life, I’m freeing up brain space.

Routines remove the need to make the same decisions over and over again. Knowing I wash dishes every night means I don’t worry (even subconsciously) about when I’m going to do the dishes at any other point during the day. Knowing Monday is Laundry Day means I don’t think about laundry on Wednesday or Saturday.

Don’t judge a habit on the first day. Just don’t. On day 1, it’s not a habit. The first time you do anything feels awkward. Feel awkward, but don’t assume you know what you’re dealing with until you’ve done it again and again and again.

Reality: I have no concept of time. I assume I have too much or too little, whichever lets me not do what I don’t want to do.

TPAD causes me either to put off starting something because I’m sure it will take more time to finish than I have available or to underestimate the time something will take and get in trouble because I put it off, assuming I’ll have plenty of time.

Timers can also be a great tool to make myself get started. They limit the time I’ll “have to” keep working. A daily five-minute pickup makes a huge difference, and I’m willing to do it when I know I’ll be done in five minutes.

I need to know for a fact how long certain tasks take so I don’t let my TPAD do what it does so well: justify procrastination. Imagining something will take more time than I have? A great reason to procrastinate. Imagining something won’t take long at all? A great reason to procrastinate.

Ten minutes is a really long time when you’re doing jumping jacks and a really short time when you need a nap. Basically, it’s a long time for something I don’t want to do and a short time for something I do want to do. If I find myself consistently putting something off, I’ll time myself doing it. I hate doing this thing, so it feels endless. Sometimes, realizing how un-endless it is helps me decide I don’t hate it as much as I thought I did. My best example is emptying the dishwasher. Oh, how I hate emptying the dishwasher. But as I got my dishwashing routine down, I realized the importance of this irritating step. Emptying the dishwasher is as important as running it. If I empty it first thing in the morning, I can refill it all day as dishes get dirty. I never even put them in the sink. This keeps my kitchen from getting out of control. But even after I understood the impact, I put off emptying the dishwasher. I hated doing it, and my hatred caused me to imagine I didn’t have time. I estimated the task took fifteen minutes. Some mornings I legitimately do not have fifteen minutes to spare. If I’m making lunches and finding shoes and putting hair in ponytails, a fifteen-minute, life-doesn’t-technically-depend-on-it task may have to wait. And then something my mother once said came back to me. She told me to time myself doing things I hate doing, just to get a realistic idea of how long those things actually take. So I timed myself emptying the dishwasher. It took four m...

Knowing the time required to complete a dreaded task gives me a realistic idea of how to fit the task into my life. I’m no longer able to conveniently stretch or compact my understanding of time according to whether I want to do something.

I don’t know about your family’s quirks, but mine has this weird obsession with wearing clothes. Like, every single day.

I could sit in a chair and watch the movement of the knob or the ticking of the time, ready to pounce when the load is done. But no sane person is going to do that (and I’m not going to do it either).

These places were halfway points, and halfway points are Procrastination Stations. Procrastination breeds more procrastination.

I encourage you to fold laundry right out of the dryer because it changed everything (or at least everything laundry-related) for me, but you don’t have to.

Idealist mamas know they need to cook. They know all the facts about how kids are more likely to be successful if they eat dinner around the table with their families on a regular basis. (If you didn’t know that, it’s true.) They know cooking at home is key to good health and staying within budget.

I loved stuff, and I had a lot of it. If something was cheap or free, if I liked it or imagined I might use it one day, I never asked “Why?” I asked “Why not?” and brought it home. All the stuff blended together and overwhelmed me.

I learned through experience that even good, useful, fits-pretty-well clothing can be clutter. Anything I have too much of, that consistently gets out of control simply because I have too much of it, is clutter.

Something strange happened: once I removed the things that needed to be removed, the space felt organized.

Decluttering is simply getting rid of stuff I don’t need. Organizing is problem-solving. When you have too much stuff, the problem is overwhelming and feels unsolvable.

Just declutter is my plan, and less is my goal. When we have less, the house stays under control.

The box is in the dining room because, when we took down our Christmas decorations three months ago, I decided to leave this one box out so I could put away the last of the Christmas towels after they went through the laundry. Leaving that box in the corner of the dining room made complete sense. Now, it’s April, and that box has been in the dining room for so long that, at first glance, my brain doesn’t register that it is not supposed to be there.

I suddenly realized what organizers meant when they casually mentioned an item deserving shelf space. The shelf was a limit.

The size of my drawers and closets determines how many clothes I can have.

Having a place for everything is how Normal People clean up their homes so easily. It’s how they avoid standing in the middle of a messy room, holding a plastic harmonica and fighting back tears.

If I truly need and use something on a regular basis, that thing deserves space in my home more than random things I almost never use.

My house grew. Literally, but not literally.

The physical urge to declutter is a very real thing. Sometimes I feel like my skin is crawling, I’m just so tired of the stuff.

The Visibility Rule: When I feel the urge to declutter, I start with visible clutter.

That visible progress inspires me to do more, and suddenly I have traction.

Do those glow in the dark bracelets make me happy? Well, now that I think about it, they really do. They remind me of a time in my life when my oldest child was in kindergarten. They’re the leftovers the teacher sent home after his kindergarten class took a “trip to the moon.” Each child received a box full of trinkets, and the teacher assigned glow-in-the-dark bracelets to me to bring for all of the kids. My little boy was so innocent then. So sweet. I remember his excitement when school was new and every day was wonderful. In his six-year-old mind, he really was taking a trip to the moon! That was such a good year. I miss the simplicity of kindergarten. Of reading a list of three-letter words for homework. Of all the kids getting along and liking one another and feeling excitement over glow-in-the-dark bracelets. Well, that little daydream wasted way too much of my precious decluttering time.

Later. There’s that delusional word again. In Later Land, I’m more decisive, more organized, and I can totally predict the future.

I’ve made a rule. If I feel like my head is going to explode while deciding whether something is worth keeping, I don’t keep it. I call it the Head Explosion Rule. No possibly-useful-but-not-actually-useful item is worth my head exploding. It’s just not. I choose the possibility of regret over dealing with the aftermath of an exploded head.

I felt sick to my stomach and short of breath when I helped a woman load our baby crib into the back of her pickup truck. Knowing our baby years were over was painful.

Her Theatre Box achieves several purposes. It limits the number of mementos she can keep, making her sort out the less-significant ones. It protects the things she does keep. The box keeps her mementos all together so she can easily look through them when she’s in the mood to relive those fun years of her life. She treasures those items. If an item is truly sentimental, truly impossible to purge, that item should be treasured.