Tidying Hack: Invite Guests Over
May 9th, 2010
Have you ever started cleaning your house only to find yourself exhausted hours later with little to show for your efforts? The biggest problem I had with cleaning is that to do a good cleaning job takes a really long time and it isn’t appreciated. When you have guests over do you think they’ll notice if you dusted underneath the plant on the shelf? Or if they’ll check to see if you vacuumed underneath the couch? Unless they’re slightly crazy they won’t care and my guess is that 99% of the time you won’t either. So the question that comes to mind is why bother?
Spending a full day a week cleaning is pointless when a couple hours tidying will do
Instead of cleaning like a maniac every so often, why not tidy a bit more frequently? The idea is good in theory but unless you like to clean its not fun! We spend way too much time in our attempt to clean when tidying would be much faster. Just so that we’re clear what I mean by spending too much time is devoting 4 hours to get your place say 90% clean when a single hour got you to 80%. That extra 10% of cleanliness for 3 times the effort is what drains us from wanting to clean (or tidy in the first place). A tidy house isn’t necessarily spotless and clean everywhere, it is clean and neat without clutter and crap all over the place. The reality is that most of us would be quite happy with a tidy house.
The ultimate Tidying Hack!
What is the one thing that you inevitably do when you have company over? You tidy the house a bit so they don’t have to kick your dirty socks off the couch to sit on it. You don’t spend countless hours cleaning but you make an effort so that the place isn’t a disaster area. It provides the necessary motivation for you to get the proverbial pig sty in order. The best part is you’ve got a time limit! Once you add in the inevitable procrastination you’re probably left with only a couple hours to get the place in order (if you’re lucky). If you hate cleaning but want to get your place somewhat tidy, have some guests over. It’ll get you into gear and force you to get a simple surface cleaning in and getting stuff out of the way.
While not a solution to getting organized it does make your place look better and at least tidy, the net result is that you feel better about it (at least for a bit). I actually found that by having guests over once in a while we managed to get the place tidy fast without going overboard trying to make everything perfect. Inviting guests over is a great way to get your place tidy fast without going overboard.
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De-cluttering one room at a time
May 1st, 2010
One of the biggest problems I find to keeping our house neat and tidy is clutter. Small items that just seem to pile up. At first they are cute little trinkets but then they get forgotten and become evil clutter. We rarely use the all of the things we own yet we still hang onto the stuff that we bought even if its broken (just in case). I had a perfect example of this in a laptop that I bought years ago when they were still very expensive; I hung onto this computer for dear life even though I no longer used it and it was out-dated. I held onto this because I paid a lot of money for it and admitting defeat and throwing it out felt like a waste. What was really a waste is how much energy I put into this dusty old computer that I didn’t use. It felt good to finally be rid of it and de-cluttering can have that effect.
Getting rid of all of the stuff that we keep but don’t use can be both challenging and rewarding. What we don’t realize is how much mental baggage we have when it comes to our clutter. Getting rid of it not only makes your house cleaner and neater it can help improve your mental well being. The real challenge is acknowledging we don’t need something and getting rid of it.
De-clutter one room at a time!
If you are about to start de-cluttering I would suggest doing this one room or even one part of a room at a time. The reason for this is that simply seeing the sheer volume of stuff that we need to go through to de-clutter can be daunting and you don’t want to be stopped dead in your tracks by the scariness of the task. It breaks the task of getting rid of the things you don’t need into more manageable chunks.
The process of really de-cluttering can take a while especially if you’ve never done it before. If you don’t need something or don’t use it then its probably a good candidate to be gotten rid of. Some items will be easy to figure out where to keep them or to get rid of them, but I find that most items fall into that grey area where there is logic to keep the item as well as to get rid of it. For those items one of the best suggestions I’ve heard of (and used) is to put everything into a bag or a box and set it aside; if you haven’t looked for any of the items in that bag or box just throw the whole thing out!
Don’t allow clutter back in
After you’ve gone through the effort of de-cluttering the biggest difficulty will be to keep new clutter out. Question any new item you’re bringing in, if you don’t really need it then don’t keep it. Or if the item is a replacement for an old item then get rid of the old item. Keeping clutter out will make it infinitely easier to keep the house neat and tidy (however neat and tidy you like it).
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