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

by Dana K. White

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?”

My ensuing passion for reality has been a big factor in my own deslobification process. I accepted that whatever I had been doing in my home wasn’t working. Ideas weren’t making a difference. The only thing that made a difference was actually doing something.

These scenarios may seem extreme, but they’re exactly how it could go down in my house. I know. Because I know, I choose reality. 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. I can’t, as a slob, do anything that will make my home harder to maintain.

The biggest housekeeping dream I’ve had to give up was my unwavering belief that I just needed to find the right method for cleaning my house.

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

My house is not a project. Viewing my home as a project does more harm than good.

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.

making something look easy takes a lot of hard work.

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. So I kept going. I added a new habit once the last one started to feel natural. Not easy, but natural.

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.

What solved my dishwashing problems? Washing the dishes.

Having a routine or not having a routine is the issue.

The only way to have a clean kitchen is to clean it. The only way

to keep a kitchen in a state where it’s easy to clean is to do the dishes every single day,

nonnegotiable tasks.

So I’ve removed the decision-making process.

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

Spend a week doing that (the dishes every night) and then add another task.

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

A place for everything will happen, but it will happen gradually,

eventually, as you declutter. Focus on getting stuff you don’t need out of your house.

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.

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.