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

by Dana K. White

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.

Having a dishwasher or not having a dishwasher isn’t the issue. Having a routine or not having a routine is the issue. People with consistently clean kitchens have routines, whether or not they have dishwashers. Dirty Dishes Math still applies to handwashed dishes. Don’t wash dishes today, and tomorrow’s task will require six times more effort.

I have never once found myself dusting and thought, “How in the world did I get here? I don’t even remember grabbing the duster!” Each and every cleaning task I do requires full cognitive awareness that I’m doing it. As a slob, I find this discouraging, but understanding this reality has helped me make progress in my home.

In the beginning of my own deslobification process, I called the things I was adding to my daily list nonnegotiable tasks. This was what they were in the beginning. I was figuring out which things had to be done daily and not allowing myself to negotiate my way out of those tasks. I am a master inside-my-own-brain negotiator. I can/could/do come up with a million reasons why now isn’t a good time, why it’s logical to wait until the mess is bigger. At some point, I started calling these nonnegotiables daily tasks. I’d whittled them down to the most essential and realized I didn’t need to keep adding more.

Don’t worry. I was disappointed, too, when I learned the reason other people’s dishes were always done was because they did the dishes every day. It’s a total bummer when you realize there really isn’t a better way.

Reality: To have a clean house, I have to clean it. That’s nowhere near as fun as reading about cleaning. I mean, duh.

Doing the dishes is the first step of this whole change-your-house process. Doing them again tomorrow is where the magic will happen.

Sometimes, I turn things into problems that aren’t really problems just because I love thinking so much.

Due to my intense dislike of such things, I chose five minutes. It was, quite literally, the shortest amount of time I could justify devoting to this task. I set the timer on my oven for five minutes and started moving through the house, picking things up and putting them away. When the timer went off, I stopped. And that right there is the thing that makes this habit different from the others. Doing dishes the first day can take hours. It’s brutal. But on the first day, a five-minute pickup takes only five minutes. However, if your house is in Disaster Status, five minutes may not make a huge impact.

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.

Things like cleaning bathrooms and mopping floors and dusting. All so irritating, but all so necessary. Even though they don’t have to be done every day, they are still never-ending. Nothing

“I didn’t want to deal with putting away awkward pieces like canning jars and lids, funnels, blender parts, and various other things I really didn’t have a home for. I found if I set the timer for a mere 5–10 minutes after the dishwashing was done, I could focus on dealing with the countertop clutter. If this is done regularly, the mountain of put-off tasks whittles down and then disappears. Setting the timer keeps me focused and on track.”

Never-ending cleaning tasks are nagging feelings. I despise nagging feelings. But nagging feelings go away when I have a plan, and the only thing I need for this plan is an awareness