Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Tips from a Naturally Untidy Person on How to Keep a Clean House



    I am not a naturally tidy person, though, I do like to have things clean/tidy.  This has always been a bit of a struggle for me since I am not able to fully relax until the house is in order, but I am not the best at keeping it that way.  Thus, I can do one of three things, spend all of my time cleaning, live with it messy, or keep the house clean.  Numbers one and two are not an option, so that means I am stuck with three.  The problem? I am Terrible at keeping things clean/tidy. Have we noticed the problem here?
    As I have mentioned before, I am married to a naturally tidy individual.  A man who likes the home to well-ordered, otherwise it stresses him out and he is not able to relax. 
As the way he feels is not something he can control, I have tried to become cleaner/tidier.  Here are some things that I have learned over the years to help me with this.

1.) Recognize the importance of what you are doing. If we are trying to keep a house clean, we usually have a good reason for doing so—in order to be more hospitable (people feel free to drop by when they want); it makes your husband more comfortable and relaxed when he gets home from work; or you feel less anxious and stressed when the house is neat. All of these are good reasons to keep things in order and reminding yourself” why” you do something can help you actually do it.

2) Set up a routine. You are more likely to accomplish tasks of if do them on the same day each week versus just “at some point.” For example, I know that I vacuum the house every Monday. Some Mondays are busier than others and I may have unexpected tasks pop up. But, no matter what occurs, I will vacuum the house on Monday because that is the one thing (or two or more things as the case may be) that I know I Have to accomplish.

3) Group what you do together into larger jobs rather than separating them into lots of individual tasks. I never knew that I did not do this until my husband pointed out the difference between how he and I do things.  This is what I mean:
     When it comes to the morning routine of preparing breakfast, feeding the kids, doing the dishes, and straightening up the kitchen, I see this as four separate tasks that all have to be completed at some point. This of course means that I might do something else, like making the bed, between getting breakfast and cleaning the kitchen up from breakfast.  Patrick, on the other hand, views it like this: Get the kids breakfast, this means do the following:
             1 – Fix food for the kids
            2 – clean up the mess from fixing the food
            3 – wash the kids dishes. 

Nothing gets left for later because it is all one job.  This way is actually a Whole Lot More efficient, and it also means that tasks are not left half done.

4) Put things away that the time rather than leaving them for later. It took me a while to realize the benefits of doing this.  In my stubborn mind I argued that I was often “too busy” to take the time to put that dish away, or hang up that purse, or put those shoes in the closet. (This is of course extremely ridiculous as it would take me less then thirty seconds to do any one of these things.) But finally, I have it down and I see how much time this actually saves in the long run.  Now, rather than vacuuming taking 40 minutes, 20 minutes for cleaning up mess, and 20 minutes for actually vacuuming, I am able to get right to vacuuming. 

5) Don’t be too hard on yourself.  If you start to keep a clean/tidy house, it is easy to start to obsess about keeping things that way.  When we do this, we can begin to hold ourselves to a really, high standards and then just get frustrated and dejected when we are unable to them. We all fail at times, don’t beat yourself up about it.  Just try to do better next time.  When we lose the motivation to do our job, it doesn’t matter how many “tricks” we know, we still won’t want to do it, which sometimes means that we won’t.

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