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

by Dana K. White

Sometimes, Worrying About the Very Best Way Keeps Me from Doing Anything

Things should be done a certain way. Why do something at all if there’s a better way it could be done? But even if I knew a better way, would I have the supplies or the time to do it that way?

All the wouldas, couldas, and shouldas in the world don’t get my bathroom clean. Know what gets it clean? Cleaning it.

Methods don’t clean your house. You have to clean your house.

I thought I needed to clean my house from top to bottom, backward and forward and inside out. Once I did that, if I could ever do that, then I could maintain. Then I could keep my home under control.

I have Slob Vision. I don’t see a few dishes. I don’t see incremental mess. I see beautifully clean and overwhelmingly messy, but the in-between doesn’t register in my brain. Even if the mess caught my eye at a random time, the scene didn’t feel urgent. The entire house was so much better than usual. Shouldn’t my reward for “so much better” be not doing the dishes?

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.

Sweeping the kitchen when the floor is so cluttered I can’t walk without tripping is a project. Sweeping the kitchen every day is a two-minute (four, tops) task. Even when the task involves picking up one or two previously invisible items off the floor.

Weeks into my deslobification process, I was learning that habits were the way to go. Habits were making a much bigger impact than I ever thought possible.

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.

A decision that’s waiting to be made is stressful, even if I don’t realize it’s stressing me.

Routines remove the need to make the same decisions over and over again.

Don’t judge this habit, or any habit, on the first day. Judge it on the day when you don’t have a panic attack at the thought of opening your front door and letting people into your home.

A big reason why cleaning my house was a daunting and overwhelming task was I didn’t understand cleaning and decluttering are not the same thing. I didn’t understand because, without daily tasks, they were the same thing. I did have to get rid of the layer of clutter before I could clean.

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.

The shelf was an impersonal limit. Once I acknowledged that limit, I didn’t have to agonize over how many cookbooks to keep. The size of the shelf made that decision for me.

Anything I can’t handle, that continually gets out of control, is clutter.

If you’re a stuff shifter, you’re living above your Clutter Threshold. The only solution is less.

Having a place for everything doesn’t mean everything is always in its place; it simply means everything has a place to go.

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

Decluttering Question #1: If I Were Looking for This Item, Where Would I Look for It First?

Decluttering Question #2: If I Needed This Item, Would It Ever Occur to Me That I Already Had One?

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.

Living miserably, surrounded by clutter while believing you could get a lot of money if you just knew how, is not an option.

Once I established routines for myself, my family could jump into those routines because the routines existed.

I refuse to put off having a comfortable home until my kids are gone and I “have time.” I won’t have time. I’ve shattered that delusion about whatever phase is coming next, time and time again. I consciously choose to solve the unique problems in my unique home in this unique phase of life, whatever that means. As long as we can do what we need to do and enjoy one another, I’m succeeding.