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.
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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