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

by Dana K. White

I can’t, as a slob, do anything that will make my home harder to maintain.

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.

Most things that look easy are skills. Skills can be learned.

A few weeks later, on a Monday morning, as I started the nonnegotiable task of sweeping my kitchen, I realized why I need to sweep my kitchen every day even though not everyone does. The task had very little to do with sweeping my kitchen. It was about the pile of newspapers on the floor by the breakfast table. I didn’t even see them until I grabbed my broom. Having a nonnegotiable task cleared my Slob Vision. I saw the clutter because I couldn’t sweep the kitchen without seeing it.

If you want a day-by-day, step-by-step guide, “28 Days to Hope for Your Home” is an appendix at the end of this book. It’s an instructional guide to developing four habits that will have a major impact on your home. More major than you could ever imagine. 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. Not anxious like who-put-that-cup-there-I-never-leave-cups-there anxious, but anxious like “How do other people not have this happen, but for me it’s a constant frustration?”

Solve your chosen problem today. Then, and this is the key, solve it again tomorrow, before it’s a problem again.

Bad habits. I have lots of those. I assumed when people talked about cleaning habits they would work the same way, but they don’t. They so don’t. I have never once found myself dusting and thought, “How in the world did I get here?

So I’ve removed the decision-making process. I don’t get to make a decision about whether I do the dishes every night.

Spend a week doing that (the dishes every night) and then add another task. I recommend sweeping your kitchen every day. Again, the first day will be completely different from the following days. After another week, start checking your bathrooms for clutter (and removing that clutter when you find it). Once that starts to feel normal after a week, do a five-minute pickup. (A five-minute pickup is exactly what it sounds like, but I’ll explain the ins and outs later.)

Fantasy: I have an analytical mind. I enjoy thinking through problems and creating solutions that will last. Reality: Sometimes, I turn things into problems that aren’t really problems just because I love thinking so much.

My point is not for you to go buy a keyless car. My point is for you to start looking for small ways you can remove worry, stress, and decision-making from your daily life.

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.

Maybe you’ll have a Cleaning Day where you do all the major cleaning tasks on Saturday. Maybe you’ll clean bathrooms on the first and third Saturdays and dust, vacuum, and mop on the second and fourth.

One visible accomplishment inspires me to do more.

Do the easy stuff first. Start with trash. Trash is easy.

I started to see how the Container Concept applies on every level. The container determined the number of beads I could keep. The shelf determined how many containers I could have. The size of the room determined how many shelves I could have. The solution for 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.

My Clutter Threshold is the point at which I have more stuff than I can keep under control—the point at which my stuff turns into clutter.

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.

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

I want to be sure I share what I’ve observed about how Normal People keep their homes uncluttered. They err on the side of getting rid of things.

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

My face lights up with a smile. I’m encouraged to keep going. The results of this visible decluttering project increase my decluttering energy.

As I picked up ridiculous numbers of things Normal People would never have kept in the first place, I came up with two simple questions to ask myself. These two questions work every time. And if I can answer the first one, I don’t even have to ask the second one. Decluttering Question #1: If I Were Looking for This Item, Where Would I Look for It First?

There’s a second part of this question; it isn’t a question, but it’s very important. “Take it there right now.”

But if you ask question number one and your answer is “Hamana hamana, um, wellll . . .,” move on to question number two. Decluttering Question #2: If I Needed This Item, Would It Ever Occur to Me That I Already Had One?

If the answer to question number two is “no,” I need to stick it in the Donate Box. There is no point in keeping something I didn’t even know I had. I couldn’t answer the first decluttering question because I wouldn’t look. The thought wouldn’t even occur to me to look for it.

Here’s how “take it there right now” plays out. I start a decluttering project with the correct supplies: A black trash bag

A donatable Donate Box My feet

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.

If I start with the most-overwhelming space in my home, I get overwhelmed and am a ba-jillion times more likely not to even start. Make your kitchen more usable. Clear your dining room table and the top of the piano. Clear the floor of the laundry room. Deal with nonemotional clutter first. Improve your home, live with those improvements, and something strange will happen: decluttering momentum.

Develop four habits over four weeks. Find hope for real change in your home.

With that said, go ahead and pick a project. Your day likely feels longer now that you’ve accomplished so much (a pretty-much-clean kitchen) in a small amount of time. You have permission to use that extra time to bake some cookies with your kids. Or scrub down the bathrooms. Or choose a decluttering project.

Before you go to bed, wash the dishes and wipe down the table/ counters.

So what’s the new little thing for this week? Check the bathrooms for clutter.