Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - How to Simplify your Life - Step Two - Doing Less | Clutterbug Podcast # 77

Episode Date: October 7, 2019

This this three part podcast series titled "How to Simplify your Life", I share 3 steps to help you have less, so less and want less in your life. In my experience, simplifying your life is all about making life easier, and an easier life means more time and more happiness.  In this step two podcast, I share 3 strategies to doing less.  Be sure to listen to my last podcast, having less.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys and welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. We are doing a three-part little mini-series about simplifying your life. Basically just how to be lazier. How to have life be less hard and less work. And for me, that's like my goal. How can I get all the things done that I want in life while being as lazy as possible? So thanks so much for tuning in. We're talking about how to simplify your life. And the last podcast, if you missed it, that was step one, having less. So make sure that you check out that podcast if you haven't already. It's having less as part of this simplifying challenge that we're doing, the three-step process. And the three steps are number one is having less, number two is doing less, and number three is

wanting less. And today we're talking about doing less. We live in this world where it feels like we have to be busy. When you meet someone and they're like, hey, how's it going or how's life going? Everyone always says, oh, I'm so busy. I'm so busy. Like, this is a badge of honor. And we are busy. We're running around like chickens with our head cut off. Even when we're procrastinating the things we really should be doing and we're just like laying around watching TV or on our phone, it feels like we're busy. It's like we have to fill our time every second of our time with stuff in order to feel like we're actually accomplishing things in our lives or something. And it's ridiculous. It's so ridiculous. And especially if you're a business owner, you're a mom, you're a parent,

it doesn't even matter. We definitely feel like we need to project to other people, like we're working really hard in order to be taken seriously or in order to like not be labeled as a lazy person. For me, I freely admit that I'm a lazy person, but I still totally feel this pressure to busy all the time. So how do we do less? How do we do less of the stuff that doesn't make us happy, less of the stuff that doesn't have an impact on our lives? I definitely do not recommend we all just lay around sleeping all day. I want things in life just as much as you do and I want you to achieve those things in life. But in order to free up that time and that space, in order to make those dreams a reality, we have to stop ourselves from doing all of that busy work.

that isn't pushing the needle forward. There are things that we're wasting our time on, things that are not important to be doing. We do not get bonus points for doing things the hard way in life. We want to achieve a clean house. You don't get bonus points for scrubbing your floor on your hands and knees. That's crazy. It takes 10 times as long. I mean, if that makes you happy, if that really brings you joy, I'm all for it. But if you're doing it because you think that's the right way, you're creating busy work for yourself because you can get the same result with a swiffer mop, you know, not a swiffer wet yet, but a rubber made spray mop. And it would take five minutes. So let's talk about how do we do less? And the number one thing I recommend is taking shortcuts in life.

I'm the shortcut queen. How can we get the same results with way less work and effort? How can we take those little shortcuts in our lives in the areas where it doesn't really matter if we do it the hard way or the right way. And for me, the number one way to take shortcuts is cleaning my house. I'm going to just be honest with you. I don't scrub my bathtub. I do the spray and walk away method. I get a bathroom cleaner. I spray it down. I leave the shower and tub. I come back. I rinse it out and I'm done. I do the same thing with my toilet. I use a spray mop when cleaning my floors. I have a room that vacuums for me. If I spill something, I mop it up with my foot with a rag. I don't even bend over. Now, I'm not recommending full laziness like this, but I definitely do recommend looking at your life

and seeing how can you take shortcuts. How can you find things to achieve the same results but a fraction of the time? And a lot of this is getting your family involved. Getting your kids to make their own bed and clean their own room, getting them to make their own lunches, getting them to walk the dog and feed the pets, getting your kids and your family involved in a lot of that mundane stuff that's dragging you down and making your day busy. It's all about delegation. And this is so hard for me as a mom to delegate because I always think, yeah, but I could do it faster and better. You know what I mean? I could just do it and get it done faster and better. But all of these little five-minute tasks that I'm taking on as my own and doing are adding up to hours of my day. So delegate those tasks. Have your

kids empty the dishwasher. Have them take care of a lot of that stuff so that you can be less busy, which is going to free your time up for things that really matter and will really make a difference in your lives. The next way that we can do less is by having a routine. And this sounds crazy, pants bananas. I know it does. You're like, okay, so you want me to like have a daily routine of lists of things to do? How does that make you do less? But it really does. When you write down a daily list, a routine that you're going to do every day, it keeps you focused. Because so many times when we're doing anything from house cleaning to any task in our day, we're distracted. We're in the laundry room. And then we notice that there's a funk and we start mopping the floor.

And then we are like, oh, there's cobwebs up there. We start doing that. And then we go down the hall and we see that there's toys. We start organizing the kids' toys or we get the mail and then we start researching some weird thing we got in the middle. Like, we get distracted. And we fall down this rabbit hole. And then the things that we really wanted to accomplish, which was like, do two loads of laundry today. It's the end of the day.

We're exhausted. We've been busy. And those things didn't get. done because we've been so distracted. Doing less means really prioritizing the things that are important, writing them down on the list and doing those first. A list can really focus us, especially if it's in a really visual place. It's going to motivate us to check off things that we have to do, and it's going to stop us from getting distracted and busying ourselves with things that aren't important, with all of those little things that we do to procrastinate, that we do to fill our time so we don't feel like we're being lazy, and that are not pushing the needle forward.

Those things that are not getting us closer to the goal that we want and the dream that we want. So routines and lists are key to doing less. I know, it sounds crazy, but you got to trust me on this. And last but not least, it's being aware of our time. time wasters. It's really having that mindfulness of what am I doing with my day? What am I, you know, everybody says they get home from work and they're exhausted and it's a rush and they feel like they're working right until bed. But are you tracking the actual time that you're spending? And what are you doing? And what are those time wasters in your day? Are you just going on

Facebook to do a quick check of your news feed and going down the rabbit hole of people you hardly know from high school and you're reading their feed and then you're researching. Are you spending hours on social media? That can fly by. It can feel like 20 minutes, but it's actually two hours. And that is wasted time. I don't know what your time wasters are. But a really good way of finding out is to track them. Just to leave a piece of paper out on your kitchen counter or beside your sofa, if that's where you sit at night. and just write down like I started watching TV at nine I ended watching TV at 11 I made dinner you know but then I was watching Facebook and I was I burned dinner and it was something that should

have taken a half an hour took an hour and a half right down those time wasters I have so many so so so so many and when I'm aware of them I can be like okay this I love just checking random news feeds of people that I don't even like for some reason and for some reason I'm friends with them and I could spend hours reading about their days, even though I don't even know who they are. And I don't even really enjoy doing that. But holy bananas, that could be hours of my day. And then I don't feel fulfilled and I feel like I've accomplished nothing. And why do I even go on Facebook in the first place? That's a trigger for me. So maybe I set an alarm before I check my news feed for 15 minutes. And when it goes off, I put my phone down. It's being aware. It's having that self-awareness

of those things in our lives that do waste our precious time so that we can avoid them so that we can have that time to do things that actually make us happy and maybe that's watching TV, maybe that's playing a board game with your kid, maybe that's meditating, maybe that's, who knows, who knows what it is, but it's less of that busy time wasting stuff. it's less of the things that are not making us feel fulfilled. So when I talk about doing less, I'm not just talking about doing less work, which is definitely part of it with taking shortcuts and delegating and finding ways to create more space in your life.

But it's about doing less of the time wasting things too. Those things that do not make us happy or bring us joy, but just eat our precious time. making us feel at the end of the day like we've accomplished nothing and there's so much to do and what did I even do all day. It's okay to take time to relax and enjoy yourself, but there are things I can promise you that you are doing that are stealing your time that are not making you feel fulfilled. And let's do less of those things too. So thank you guys so much for tuning in to this quick little podcast again the last thing we talked about was having less so i want you to go back and listen to that podcast if you haven't already today we talked about how to do less and next we're

going to talk about how to want less and it's these three steps if we can just harness these three things having less doing less wanting less we can simplify our lives and a simple life equals happy life. So thank you guys so much for tuning in and I'll see you at the next podcast where we talk about how to want less.