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June 3 - June 5, 2020
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or you can just pick a habit. Here’s how I chose: I looked around my house and decided what made me the most anxious.
“Just doing the dishes makes a difference and can inspire you to do more, but if it doesn’t . . . at least the dishes are done.”
I called the things I was adding to my daily list nonnegotiable tasks.
But every five-minute pickup is a small deposit in your clean house account.
Big cleaning tasks feel like the thing, but daily stuff is the thing.
I have no interest in what should work. I care about only what does work.
Procrastination breeds more procrastination.
Decluttering is simply getting rid of stuff I don’t need. Organizing is problem-solving.
the true definition of clutter (anything you can’t easily keep under control)
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 Visibility Rule: When I feel the urge to declutter, I start with visible clutter.
My home is my home. It’s my space. Anyone who isn’t living in (or paying for) my space doesn’t have a say in what I keep in it.
I value open, livable space more than I value my stuff.
The life I have is the life I have, and my home is my home. I can’t change those things, so I might as well make the best of them.
“Ideas weren’t making a difference. The only thing that made a difference was actually doing something. Cleaning with whatever I had on hand, whether it was the perfect thing or not.”
Cleaning and organizing, contrary to how I feel when I visit a Normal Person’s home, are not competitive sports. My only responsibility is to myself and my own home and my own family. As long as I do the dishes, I’m winning.
