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August 26 - September 5, 2018
Not all idealists are slobs, but most slobs are idealists.
Methods don’t clean your house. You have to clean your house.
Projects consume me. I let everything else in my life go on hold, and when I’m done, I stand back and expect (and enjoy) the applause.
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.
All that work, and I had been betrayed. My project energy was gone, and my heart was broken once again by my cruelly messy house. With each failure, my cynicism increased. I accepted the hopelessness of my situation a little more.
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?
Part of the joy of a project is not thinking about the project anymore once I’m done. If my entire focus for three weeks before the party was cleaning and purging and not letting dishes pile up on the counter, the three days after the party should include not cleaning, not purging, and not worrying about 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.
That’s a rather depressing reality for someone who is always convinced she has a better way to do everything and who thrives when she’s working toward a big finish.
So the goal becomes doing the dishes every day and preventing the project.
Most things that look easy are skills. Skills can be learned.
Once you have a well-practiced skill, it looks easy, but making something look easy takes a lot of hard work.
every single day, whether the number of dishes seemed worth doing or not
When I swept every day, sweeping the floor wasn’t the least bit overwhelming.
Having a nonnegotiable task cleared my Slob Vision. I saw the clutter because I couldn’t sweep the kitchen without seeing it.
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.
think of these things as pre-made decisions.
I’ve removed the decision-making process.
Routines remove the need to make the same decisions
over and over again.
Cleaning Intuition is a thing, and I don’t have it. As
When all my big cleaning was inspiration-dependent, the length between cleanings was a vague memory, a nagging feeling, and doing the task again depended on noticing. With Slob Vision, I’m not good at noticing. By the time I noticed the floor needed to be mopped, the floor really needed to be mopped, and mopping was an urgent, huge task. When I knew Thursday was Mopping Day, I realized I needed to mop every time Thursday came around. Noticing was random, but Thursdays aren’t. They happen every week.
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.
When “Laundry!” pops into my brain, I can start, but I can’t finish. Finishing is my problem in the first place, so things that don’t allow finishing are a special form of slob torture.
Anything I have too much of, that consistently gets out of control simply because I have too much of it, is clutter.
Keeping up with daily habits is hard (seemingly impossible sometimes) when clutter is everywhere. But decluttering will make no lasting impact without daily habits in place. I know this. If I turned my head away from a finished decluttering project, it was a disaster again when I looked back at it.
Organizing is problem-solving. Problem-solving (especially when I’ve failed at exactly that over and over and over) is overwhelming. I stared. I analyzed. I devised strategies and thought of every possible way those strategies could fail.
The overabundance of stuff in my home was keeping me from being the mother I’d always dreamed of being.
As stuff left, peace came.
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. Giving myself permission to just declutter gave me permission to get started. I didn’t need a plan or a huge chunk of time. I’m giving you the same permission. Amazing freedom comes with this separation of organizing and decluttering.
can maintain less. Instead of worrying about where to put all my stuff, I get rid of things I don’t absolutely need and truly use.
Do the easy stuff first. Start with trash. Trash is easy.
The key to fighting decluttering paralysis is to make the space less visually overwhelming with as little angst as possible.
The solution to my clutter problem is not to find another container, add a new shelving unit, build a new room, or buy a new home. The solution to my clutter problem is letting my house be my container.
Anything I can’t handle, that continually gets out of control, is clutter.
If you have too much stuff (like I did), there isn’t a place for everything. There just isn’t. Don’t start by looking for a place for everything. I tried to shove all my stuff into random places, pushing and grunting to make it all fit.
Use your understanding of the true definition of clutter (anything you can’t easily keep under control) and ask yourself, “Can I handle this?” instead of “Should I keep this?”
If you’re a stuff shifter, you’re living above your Clutter Threshold. The only solution is less.
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.
Once you’ve decluttered to the point where you have only what you can handle, disaster recovery is about putting things away. That’s it.
It’s not about deciding what to do with all your stuff. Putting things away is just a matter of moving them from one spot to another, no angst-ridden decision-making involved.
Normal People naturally ask why they should keep something instead of the rhetorical “Why not?” question that slobs favor. Basically, they’re born knowing their Clutter Threshold, and they live within it.
When I find myself Stuff Shifting entire groups of homeless items, I now know to look for storage space in my own home. If we really need this stuff, it needs a designated space. Floating from the master bedroom to the kitchen isn’t an option in a livable home.
To clear my Slob Vision, I shake my head and walk around my house. If I see a cabinet I know is full, but I can’t remember exactly what is inside, there’s a decent chance I haven’t used whatever is inside in a very long time.
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.
The storage closet is full of decisions. Decisions stress me out, and stress makes me tired. By the time I’m done, I’m done. My decluttering energy is spent.
The Visibility Rule: When I feel the urge to declutter, I start with visible clutter. I stop. I look around. I let my brain register which out-in-the-open space is piled with stuff.
Decluttering Question #1: If I Were Looking for This Item, Where Would I Look for It First?
