Let’s be honest, not everyone is naturally clean and organized.
When I was a kid, every Friday was house cleaning day. We would all come home from school, get a snack, and get busy cleaning our rooms. Then we all had another room in the house we were responsible for cleaning. If we didn’t get it done on Friday, we had to do it on Saturday. There were no sleepovers or hanging out with friends if we didn’t get our cleaning jobs done, so we had the incentive to clean quickly.
But it was rarely ever enough incentive for me…
I would sit in my room amidst the mess and feel overwhelmed by how much I had to do. I would be in there for hours. Sometimes my mom would come in to help, probably because she just wanted it to get done, but it just stressed me out more.
The fact is, I didn’t have the organization skills in my mind to organize the space around me. I believed I was messy and that I would always be messy because I didn’t have a clean and organized space like my sister.
Then, I grew up. I got my own place. And I hated cleaning. Everything inside of me rebelled against it. Little did I know that my attitude and rebellion had way more to do with the emotions I associated with cleaning than anything else. So I would clean because I didn’t like having a messy house, but I loathed it!
I lived like that for years.
Shortly after I moved to North Carolina, I met one of my very best friends, Tiffany. Both of our spouses worked nights, and we both had two children, a boy and a girl, and our sons both had autism. After our kids were in bed for the night, we would spend the rest of the evening on the phone. We researched new autism therapies, special diets, perused autism discussion boards, and talked about all the things we had dealt with during the day. We also cleaned our houses.
Then Tiffany found The FLYLady.
I was reluctant because I didn’t like cleaning, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend more time on CLEANING.
But, Tiffany is relentless when she knows something will help you.
Eventually, I gave in…of course. I subscribed to the emails and started reading all the information on her website. But I didn’t jump into action. I was interested enough that I wanted to know more, so I ordered FLYLady’s book, Sink Reflections, and I actually read it.
I finished that book feeling motivated and with a new perspective on cleaning and organizing. Tiffany didn’t say, “I told you so,” she just jumped right in with me and cheered me on as I shined my sink for the first time and started going through my house and throwing all of the excess junk away.
Over the next few months, my house transformed, and I found myself excited to clean! What?!? It had happened. My attitude about cleaning had changed as I saw the results from doing things differently to meet my needs.
Then, I found out I was expecting another baby.
I spent four months turned inside out. My house fell apart again very quickly. Shortly after the morning sickness subsided, my son was diagnosed as hearing impaired, and I spiraled emotionally into a tailspin all over again. But the tailspin ended abruptly when I started having dizzy spells and blacking out daily. After they diagnosed me with a heart condition that was a danger to both my baby and me, I was hospitalized for a few days while they figured out what to do. They put me on medication that could kill my baby but would save my life until they could do surgery to repair the problem. My head was in a constant fog from the medication, but I stopped blacking out.
Two months later, my daughter was also diagnosed with hearing impairment worse than my son’s.
The last thing in the world I cared about was my house. I did the bare minimum to keep us afloat. Ensuring the kids had healthy meals and clean clothes to wear were about the only two things I really felt capable of staying on top of.
My youngest daughter was born a month early, and I had surgery 11 weeks later. Three weeks after my surgery, my husband left to complete a four-month training, and at the end of that four months, we would be moving to Las Vegas.
I had to get the house listed and on the market to sell during the time he was gone.
With my head clear, a healthy new baby, and having adjusted to having two children with hearing aids, I got back to work.
I look back on those four months that I was alone with three littles as one of the most focused and calm periods of time in my whole life, and I miss it.
My house was the cleanest it has ever been; it was easier to clean and more organized than ever. There was not one single drawer, cabinet, or closet that wasn’t pristine. The best part was that I did not spend my whole day cleaning…EVER. It was just little bursts of time a few times a day, and that’s it.
We lived on a very regimented schedule and spent hours every day in the car driving to and from two different schools and to therapy appointments, many of which were an hour and a half away in a different city. So the time we had at home also had to be very organized and schedule driven, which cut down on the behaviors and temper tantrums.
Life wasn’t perfect…it never is. I had three little kids to care for on my own while selling my house and getting ready to move. But my stress was greatly reduced by not feeling overwhelmed by a constant state of disarray in my house. That made all the difference.
As my kids got older (and messier) and our life grew increasingly complicated, I never again achieved that same organizational level. But I still use the lessons I learned and have never retreated into my loathing of cleaning. It has become part of my self-care and a way that I manage stress. There is very little I love more than coming home to a clean and organized house.
If this is something you would like to work on in your own life, you can check out this link to learn more about the methods I learned from The FlyLady.
And here are a few strategies for success:
1. Your Timer is your friend.
Using a timer to give yourself a set amount of time to work on something does wonders for your attitude. Whether you are setting it for fifteen minutes, taking a break, and setting it for another fifteen minutes, or setting it for fifteen minutes and being done for the day, your brain will thank you. It gives your mind a stopping point, so you don’t start to feel overwhelmed by how much you still have to do. You are permitting yourself to stop before you are exhausted, overwhelmed, and frustrated.
2. You can declutter any space in 5 minutes a day.
Grab two trash bags and head to the space you want to declutter. Set your timer on your phone for 5 minutes. Quickly find ten things to throw away and put them in one bag. Quickly find ten things to give away and put them in the other bag. Then, quickly find ten things that are out of place and put them away. That’s it for the day. Then you repeat the next day, and the day after that, until you have completely decluttered the space. Yes, this works! I decluttered my entire house using this method.
3. You can get an amazing amount done in 15 minutes.
I would not have believed this when I first started this journey. As someone who cleaned for hours at a time, I thought for sure it wouldn’t work. But I trusted my friend, so I tried it out. You can get an AMAZING amount of cleaning done in 15 minutes. Once you have a room clean, it is astoundingly easy to keep it clean if you maintain it every day. Using the pre-made cleaning lists for monthly and weekly tasks, there will never be another time that you need to do an overhaul on a space. It will always be clean and organized.
4. Perfection is the enemy.
The desire for perfection is an obstacle that will prevent you from having the results you want. Unless you live alone with no animals, your house is never going to remain perfectly clean. It’s not. That doesn’t mean that your efforts aren’t going to improve the state of your home vastly; it just means that accepting something other than perfection is going to allow you to find joy in your efforts and in the journey to have the home you want to have. If you have several small humans in your house…or worse, several teenage humans, the efforts needed to maintain a clean and organized home will be significantly greater. But insisting on perfection is going to make you and everyone around you absolutely miserable. Sometimes you have to accept the season of life you are in and work with what you have.
5. There is incredible peace that comes from living in an organized space.
If I walk into a room that is a mess, all I can think about is what needs to be done to fix the mess. I can’t relax, I can’t unwind, and I sure can’t focus on the things that are important to me. By keeping my home clean and organized, I have created a scenario that allows me to spend my time focusing on the things I want to focus on. I don’t have a running list in my head of all the things I need to do around the house…because they are already done. There is such peace in that! I would not be able to do all the things I do if I was surrounded by chaos. So if you have big important dreams you want to achieve, but you feel too overwhelmed by all you have to do, take a look around you and see if the space around you is in disarray. If it is, take some time and adopt some strategies to get it organized so you can focus your time and energy on making that big important dream a reality.
It doesn’t matter where you start your journey to having a more organized home, it just matters that you start. Using these strategies will help you along the way!
For more, you can follow me on Pinterest @highlyunlikelylife, on IG @ahighlyunlikelylife, or on Facebook @ahighlyunlikelylife. You can also subscribe to The Highly Unlikely Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts!