I have a confession. It’s not fair blame my three young children for my messy house. Yes, my kids have a lot of stuff. And no, they don’t put it away without a LOT of nagging. However, if I’m being honest, I’ve always been messy. When I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade, I wrote a song about my messy room. In college, my dorm room was a disaster. When I got my own apartment, and then my first house, I just had more space to clutter up. If you look at the piles of paper on my desk at work, you’ll know that my kids get bad rap.
I’m not sure how it happens, but I attract messes. Mail piles up on the table by the door. Dirty laundry piles up, dirty dishes fester in the sink, shoes stay where they were kicked off. It’s not that I’m lazy, I try. I’ve tried every system, app, and online course you can think of to get and stay organized. None of it stuck because I’m terrible at maintaining routines. However, the chaos in my home just got to the point where it was out of control and causing stress for me and my family. So I went back to the things I learned from all my previous attempts at getting organized and committed to doing 3 things every day.
Note: I didn’t implement all 3 at the same time. I did this slowly because it’s all I could reasonably commit myself to. I would do each for a week or 2 until it didn’t feel like a huge burden and I wasn’t acting like a complete martyr.
1. Wash the dishes (All of them)
Did I forget to tell you there’s nothing earth shattering here?
So the first thing is to wash the dishes every day. All of them, including the pots and pans. This is a challenge for me. I don’t have a dishwasher. However, there are a couple of reasons why this is important.
- Dirty dishes in the sink are gross.
- It’s a pain (and shame-inducing) to have to wash a cup when one of my children asks for juice.
- If you have a sink full of dirty dishes and a dirty pot or 2 sitting on the stove, you have clean before you can cook. This led to me feeding my kids take out or frozen chicken tenders and fries way more often than I would like.
Full Disclosure: I still haven’t figured out meal planning as well as I would like and I still feed my kids out of the freezer sometimes. However, with the dishes washed, I have a fighting chance to cook a healthy meal for my family.
Here’s a tip. Pair your dish washing time with something you enjoy. For me, this is my podcast listening time. I zone out to The Moth or This American Life (yes, I’m an NPR geek) and then next thing I know, the dishes are done.
2. Do a Load of Laundry
There’s five of us, we generate a crap-ton of laundry. I’m blessed to have a washer and dryer at home so this works for me. The alternative is to let it pile up and sacrifice a weekend day or 2 to washing. The problem with weekend laundry for me, is that I get sidetracked before it’s done and then don’t finish. Now, we’re going into a new week and someone is bound to run out of clean underwear.
So let’s get specific about what it means to do a load of laundry.
- Wash
- Dry
- Fold
- PUT AWAY
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had so many baskets of unfolding laundry hanging around that no one knows if its clean or dirty anymore. Or worse yet, I fold the clothes, but don’t put them away and have to refold them because the whole pile got messed up from us digging through the basket looking for clean clothes.
My 10 year old is responsible for putting her own clothes away (nagging required). My husband also puts his own laundry away. I do the rest (for now).
3. Tidy or Declutter for 15 5 Minutes
Every home organization system I’ve ever studied teaches to declutter or tidy for 15 minutes a day. This seems so completely reasonable, but I could never manage to do it for more than a day or 2. Usually, by the time I get to this step, I’m so tired that I don’t want to do anything else. So I reduced it to 5. My logic is the 5 minutes I do, is better than the 15 minutes that don’t get done. Also, I find that once I get started I usually go more than 5 minutes anyway.
Perfectionism Has No Place Here
Listen, my house isn’t company ready because of these 3 tasks. That’s not the point. The point is, my stress and mommy-guilt level is reduced because, I provide healthy meals more often, there’s ALWAYS clean underwear and I can see a surface or 2 around my house.
I’m also not perfect at getting all 3 done every day. It gets done MOST days. I would say all 3 tasks get done at least 5 or 6 days a week. I’ve learned to be ok and forgive myself for that. I also get back on track as soon as I can. It’s more important to me to hold on to the small bit of sanity that I have created with these routines than it is to go to bed early or to sit and relax after a long day.
Was this helpful? Do you have a simple routine that keeps you sane? Let me know in the comments..