Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - The Real SECRET to an Organized Home | Clutterbug Podcast # 243

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

In this week's episode, I am sharing the real SECRET that helped me transition from a chaotic, cluttered life to becoming someone who is naturally tidy. I will also share the three mantras I repeat daily that transformed my mindset and make keeping a clean home effortless. If you have ever struggled to maintain a tidy space, this episode will give you the tolls and mindset shift you need to finally break free from the mess!    Take the 30 Day Declutter Challenge here: https://clutterbug.me/declutterchallenge2024     You can find more Clutterbug content here: Website: http://www.clutterbug.me YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@clutterbug TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clutterbug_me Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clutterbug_me/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Clutterbug.Me/   #clutterbug #podcast #motivation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready for the secret to a house that's clean and tidy and organized? I'm going to share it with you right now. Hey, Clutterbugs, welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. Today, I am going to be sharing with you not only the secret to a clean, organized, and tidy home, which is super exciting, but also my top three mantras that helped change my brain. From somebody who was just naturally a super slob and always struggled with a messy house, to somebody whose house, I mean, I'm not great at the deep cleaning and I'm not going to pretend that I am, but I am somebody who always has a house that is tidy and yet I don't spend all my

time tidying and cleaning. Like I spend very little time. So I'm excited because I feel like those three mantras have changed everything. But before I get into the mantras, I really want to talk about the secret, the real secret. And as you're listening to this podcast, don't just passively sit on your butt and watch or listen. Get up and do something right now that you've been procrastinating, something you know you have to do that you've been putting off that needs to get done. And I'm going to give you three quick examples. Right now, if you already have something in mind, cuckoo, cool, do it, friends. But if you're like, I don't know what to do, Cass. One, fill a bucket, a pot or a bowl with some hot soapy water. It can be all-purpose cleaner, a little splash of that,

or a squirted dish soap, some hot water, and a rag. I want you to walk around your house with this bucket or pale or bowl or pot. Grab your rag, dip it, ring it, and start wiping stuff. Just wipe surfaces. Wipe the top of bookshelves, wipe your cabinets, wipe tabletops, wipe knick-knacks, wipe frames, just wipe. Just wipe. Just wop. Just wop. Walk and wipe, walk and wipe all around your house while you're listening. That is something easy and really effective that we need to do every now and then, and probably we haven't done in a very long time. The second thing that you can do is a quick catch up, whether it's dishes, laundry, or tidy.

We're going to catch up right now. Look around. What's driving you crazy? Can you just get in there, get up, and start working on it while listening to this right now. excuses. Come on. Get up. Take action on something like that. And the last thing that you can do is declutter. So grab a trash bag and open up drawers and cabinets and just stand back, take a look and assess. Am I using everything in here? If not, grab something, put it in the bag. Some of the stuff is going to be good. Maybe it's to be donated. That's okay. We can take it out of the bag later

and we can donate it. Right now, we're just running around the house. Maybe you don't want to put donations in a trash bag. That's fine. Grab one of those reusable shopping bags we always forget to bring to the grocery store. Grab one of those. Run around and try to find things to leave. And if you need extra push, do a 21 item toss, which is right now you are going to hunt for 21 things

that are going to leave your house while you're listening to this podcast. Friends, it's time to make yourself proud. We are going to spend a half an hour together and we are going to move mountains. All right. Get going. Okay, let's talk about the secret. You're not going to like the secret. I am a person who is always looking for a shortcut.

And I definitely have a tendency to fall into a victim mentality a lot of the times on things that I struggle with or things I find hard, whether that's exercising, you know, working out, just generally eating healthy, and it used to be taking care of my home. And what I mean about victim mentality is I was really good at making excuses, and I still am good at making excuses, of why I'm not able to do it. It's too hard, no one helps me. I don't have self-discipline. I just don't have the motivation. I have chronic illness. I have pain. I'm exhausted. I work too much. So many excuses and reasons to keep me living a life that I'm not

happy with, but giving me an out so I don't have to actually do the work to change. Do you know what I'm saying. I make a whole lot of excuses of why right now is not the best time or I got to do it tomorrow or for whatever, whatever reason. I suck at this. Why bother? It's just going to get messy again tomorrow. Why bother eating a salad? I'm just going to probably eat cookies tomorrow. You know, I can't give up junk food. I love it so much. So many things. So many stupid excuses that keep me in this victim mentality. It's not my fault. There's nothing I can do about it. It's out of my hands. I'm just a passenger here, not driving the bus or the car. I can't possibly change the outcome of where my life is going. And so when we talk about the secret, I spent a lot of time

and I still do in a lot of areas of my life looking for the quick fix. How can I buy my way out of this problem? How can I spend a little bit of money and just fix this? Or how can I find a shortcut or a hack or something easy so I don't have to do it the hard way in order to solve this problem? I spend a lot of time doing that. Or how can I find somebody else who's going to give me a step-by-step plan so I don't have to come up with the plan because that's scary. I don't know where to start. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm not good at this. I'm waiting for someone else to do the planning part for me or I'm waiting until I have the time, money, or whatever, help. You know, all these excuses. All these trying to find a way around what I'm really avoiding,

which is just getting in and getting started. So you see, where this is headed, right? What is the secret? What is the secret to a clean and tidy and organized home? It's getting off your butt and doing something right now. Yep, that's what it is. There is no shortcut. The shortcut is getting rid of the stuff you're not using. The shortcut is decluttering. The shortcut is doing your dishes right after you dirty them so that you don't have to soak them and scrub them and spend hours later with like a whole kitchen fill of dishes. The shortcut is wiping up the spill before it dries so you don't have to scrub it tomorrow or or keeping up on the dusting a little bit so it doesn't get so thick that you have to like, you know, use cloths to get it off because you can't just use a little swiffer because it's

way too bad. Your floors are so sticky. You have no choice but to like really scrub or your bathrooms, the toilet, the tub, whatever it is. The secret is to put down the excuse. It's and pick up a rag or pick up a trash bag. And I didn't want to hear that for a very long time. I was so resistant to that for a really long time. And this mantra that people say was, just get started, just do five minutes. I resisted that too because I thought, what the heck am I going to get done in five minutes? What a waste.

Look around. I can barely see my floor. What is five minutes going to? to do. It's a, that's so stupid. I'm going to get started. I'm not even going to see a difference. I'm going to wait till I can do it all on the weekend or I can spend hours tomorrow. Excuse, victim. It's not your fault. It's okay. You'll do it later. Get out of the work today. And when I finally had enough, like I got to the point where I was, I couldn't take it anymore. the state of my home was making me feel so insecure, so bad about myself, so ashamed

that I was angry at the mess. I was angry at the clutter. I was angry at the stuff. I stopped blaming myself and other people and I started blaming the inanimate object. When I got really peaved off at the junk from Walmart, that's when things really started to change. And you can change your mindset right now. You don't need to work harder. You don't. You just have to do something right now. This isn't about doing a one and done all in nothing.

This is about getting up, getting mad at the fact that this is never ending and make it better. Fill a trash bag with the junk. You are more important. And I say this in so many, so many, you must be so sick of here. hearing this, but honestly, have you really internalized this message that I'm saying? And that's what I want for you. I want you to have like, if there's a hierarchy of importance in your home, you are tippity top, man, you are the, you are the, on the top of the little weather vein. You're the rooster up there. You're the king of your castle, man. You're sitting on the top.

You are the most important hands down. But that also, you're also. means not that, oh, I'm so important, I don't have to do any work. That means you're the boss of your house. You're in charge of your house. It is your responsibility and you deserve to have it not be a crazy amount of work to maintain. But you also deserve it to be a space that feels good and that you're proud of and isn't overwhelming and doesn't take a lot of time to pick up. so that you have time in your day to do the things that you actually enjoy. I don't care if it's Netflix on the couch, right? But that stuff comes after the work is done.

And it doesn't have to be the whole house done and perfect. That's not what I'm saying at all. But you wouldn't let your teenager come home, go to their room that's like filled with garbage and trash and clothes all over the floor and everything's a mess. And, you know, they're like, mom, I need to be. need to borrow 20 bucks and they're just like watching TV or whatever on their bed. You wouldn't let them get away with that crap. You wouldn't reward them with the good stuff until they've done their chores. And sometimes we got to parent ourselves and put on our big girl pants and say,

listen, no, you're not allowed to like go watch that movie until you've spent five minutes and cleaned up the dinner dishes. Come on. You're a freaking grown up. You're not allowed. This isn't about working 24-7. This isn't about getting to a point of exhaustion. This is about getting out of working 24-7 and getting yourself out of a state of exhaustion by slowly getting to a point where things don't feel hard. The secret is getting up and getting started. And you're doing that right now. And I've bringing a little tough love to try to motivate you, but you deserve it in the fast. way to get there. The honest, it's not about these hacks you see on TikTok. It's not about buying crap from the dollar tree. It's not about coming up with some more shelving or some fancy

stacking bin system. You don't need more storage. You need less stuff. The hack is filling boxes and trash bags and getting stuff out of your house forever. That's the hack. Okay? That's the secret. And if you're like, I don't even, this is so scary and overwhelming. Right now, you can try the 30-day decluttering a challenge. It's five minutes a day and you only have to find five things and it is 100% free. You can go watch those videos on YouTube, one a day. You can go to my website at clutterbug.com. You can sign up.

You can get those daily emails and just five minutes a day. No excuses. This is the hack. This is the shortcut. This is the secret. You getting up and taking action, but doing it consistently. Not one day on the weekend every couple of weeks, bust in your butt till you're exhausted. That's not the secret. That's the opposite of progress. That's burnout. That's just stuck on this hamster wheel cycle forever of like, cleaning like a crazy person for it to slowly get messy again and then cleaning like a crazy person. Nope, we're getting off that hamster wheel. You are done with that life. You are just going to maintain easy, peasy, lemon squeezy all the time. And yep, you got to work to get there and you got to work to maintain it, but it's a whole lot less work than it is living in a cluttered messy house. Managing the mess is so time consuming. It is so energy draining. It is so toxic. and negative and it is eating away at your fun and your extra free time and enough is enough.

Stop getting mad at yourself and your spouse and your kids and get mad at what you should really be mad at. And that is the junk in your house that you're not using, you're not loving, and it's just laying around like useless lumps taking up your space and your time and your mental capacity. I want you to think of all that stuff as squatters. Have you ever heard of squatters? So sometimes people will have like an empty home or even they rent out the home and someone will come in and maybe at first they pay rent and then they stop paying rent and they just refuse to leave and you're stuck now maintaining this home, paying the mortgage on it, paying the utility, You can't kick them out because squatters rights, and they're just laying all over your stuff being lumps.

And imagine if it got worse than that. And these squatters that are just laying in your home, now you have to bathe them. And they're like, move me over there. And you're picking them up and carrying them around your house to different spots. You're cleaning them. You're feeding them. You're remembering all their names and what they're supposed to be doing. And they're all doing nothing.

Sounds ridiculous, right? When you say it like that, friend, that is the junk in your house. They are tiny little squatters. Maybe when you first bought it, it was useful. Maybe when you first bought it, it was paying rent and it was earning its keep, but it has long since stopped earning its keep. And now it's just a freeloading, loafy piece of crap in your house that is stealing from you. And you've got to get mad about it. Okay? And what we often do is we're like, oh well I feel bad kicking it out. I don't want that squatter teapot to be homeless or whatever. I don't want to just give it to Goodwill.

It's a perfectly good squatter teapot. What I'm going to do is get some bins and just pack it all into bins and move it in the basement. So now you're just building tiny homes for squatters in your home. And you're just making them a condominium in your freaking basement. What? That's ridiculous. I mean, it sounds ridiculous when we say it in the way of like squatter, but the truth is that's exactly what's happening. So it's time to put the blame where the blame really deserves to be laid and that's on the stuff. Goodbye. You're ridiculous. You don't pay rent. You don't serve a purpose. You're useless. You're getting the freak out of my house

because I work hard enough as it is and I don't have to work extra hard for you freeloading. junk from Walmart, done, right? That is the mentality that will be the secret to a clean and tidy house that stays that way all the time. I got to take a second to thank today's podcast sponsor, HelloFresh. I've been using HelloFresh for a few years now and it just saves me three days a week. I have meals delivered to my door and everything is fresh, delicious and pre-packing. with step-by-step instructions that's even I can do, right? It's so easy. My kids can put together. And a lot of the meals, you have over 40 to choose from, a lot of them you can have on the table in under 15 minutes. It's cheaper than takeout, and it's easy, fast, and really nutritious.

If you haven't tried HelloFresh, it's something that you might want to give a try, this busy season. why not try it out and right now you can get 10 meals free across seven boxes for new subscribers only go to hellofresh.com slash free clutter pod again that's hellofresh.com slash free clutter pod for 10 free hello fresh meals just by signing up today okay now that i've kind of yelled at you for a little about the secret and getting up and taking action and getting mad a little tough love i do want to share three mantras with you three kind of sayings that i repeat over and over especially when i first went from living a really messy chaotic cluttered life to transitioning to someone who is naturally tidy i mean i don't know if that's me yet but i am to the point where i'm naturally

putting things away instead of putting them down. And my family is too. And there's really three mantras that really helped rewire my brain and change the way I manage my stuff. And the first is the surfaces are hot lava. And so I don't know if you have kids, if you ever played that hot lava game where the floor is hot lava. My kids used to do this when they were younger. They'd be like, Mom, the floor is hot lava. And everyone would have to jump on the furniture, jump on the couch, or climb on the counter because you couldn't stand on the floor because it was hot lava and you would melt. So I remember one day, I think it was my son or my daughter, they put something on the counter and I was like, the counter's hot lava.

And they immediately picked it back up. And this light bulb moment came on. I was like, yeah, I need to start treating my surfaces like their hot lava. Like if I put something down on them, they're going to burn up immediately. because it's really easy to kind of, without thinking, like subconsciously even, just drop stuff on every flat surface that we have, whether it's the kitchen counter, the top of the dresser, the bathroom counter, maybe a small console table when you walk in the house, we just aren't thinking and we have a tendency of dropping things down.

So what we did was I made little sticky notes that said, this is hot lava. and I actually like took time to clear off our hot spots where we would normally pile and my family would normally pile and I put a sticky note that said this is hot lava exactly where we would normally pile and here's what that did so you'd come in and you'd have something in your hands and you'd go to put it in the spot and you'd see the sticky note you'd be like oh yeah right I got to find a spot for this and it forces you to do two things one move and actually put it way it's supposed to go, which is training your brain to put things away when you're done with them. But two, it also trains you and helps you because if you're like, I don't have a place to put

this. That isn't this. Like this counter is the place to put it. It doesn't have a home. This allows you to really look at your house differently and say, okay, well, where is the best spot for this to go? How can I create a new home for this thing? really close by to where I naturally put it down. Maybe you clear out a drawer underneath or you hang hooks above or you get a little basket to put there. It like makes you be intentional about your home and how you naturally use your home so that you can create new homes and zones to keep yourself tidy. So it is just as easy to put something away as it is to set it down in that spot. And doing this like hot lava thing with sticky notes, super, super helpful because

it's that visual reminder like, oh, yep, can't put it here. Oh yeah, hot lava. And then you are forcing yourself to do something different with the stuff. So that is one kind of mantra or I guess this is a hack. Listen, this is if you're like me, you're like, give me the hacks. Fine, fine, fine, fine. There, it's a hack. That actually is really, really helpful. Another thing that absolutely, helped me and I'm drilling this into my 18 year old daughter over the past year. I've been just repeating this over and over and over again and it's starting to work. And it definitely worked on me. It's the mantra, never leave a room empty handed. So now that we have a two story home and even before, we are a family that has snacks in our bedroom. Sometimes we'll even have lunch in our

bedroom. So it tended to accumulate like a lot of pop cans and plates and dishes. And especially if you have teens, it's like, holy heck man, how do you have 17 pop cans in two days and candy wrappers and everything else? It's nuts. But the truth is, all of us, including me, we're going down to get a new pop or another snack or we're going down to get something else and we're leaving all the dishes or the laundry or the garbage or whatever it is in the room. We're not thinking. We're not, it isn't an intentional like, I'm just going to leave this mess. It's that we're not even, it's not even dawning on us.

Our brain isn't even registering that stuff. So when we can constantly repeat a mantra, never leave a room empty handed, and we can do things like put sticky notes, but on the door, eye level, on the light switch, whatever it is. and then, oh, okay, what can I grab? And we turn around and look. When we repeat this over and over, very quickly we can create a habit. It's called a thought habit, which is before we leave any room, this thought of,

what can I grab? Can't leave the room empty handed. What can I take with me? We'll naturally start to pop into our head. So we at first need to train ourselves to have this thought over and over and over again, which again we can do with just constant repeating it or with like little sticky notes or reminders. But eventually we won't need that anymore and we'll already like when we pass through a room or leaving a room our brain will know, oh, never leave a room empty handed.

And this will be a thought that just pops up. This is life changing. So without me even thinking, if I'm downstairs and I'm about to go upstairs, my brain says, what can I bring upstairs with me? Is there a load of laundry I can carry that's clean? Is there toilet paper rolls I can bring up to put in the bathrooms? Is there cleaner that I can bring up to use later? And oftentimes going up, there isn't always something to bring, but my brain still asks the question. And then definitely on the way down. Is there a dirty laundry I can bring? Is there a basket? Is there dishes? Is there trash? Like, I do not go down the stairs. I don't have to consciously

think, my brain does it for me. It reminds me. It's on autopilot now because I've trained myself to have this mantra and I'm seeing it with my daughter now too. So when she's coming down the stairs, she has like an arm full of crap. Something. My kids are just like, if they're going downstairs, they got to bring something. And if they're coming up, they got to bring something. And it doesn't always happen that they have something to bring. But their brain is doing this now without them even realizing it or having to force themselves anymore and it's keeping our house way tidier because a huge contributor to clutter and mess is lazy clutter it's stuff we're just not even thinking to grab and we have to wait until it's time to clean and then we run around and pick it all up pick up the trash pick up the

dishes pick up the things put things back you know but when we have this mantra don't ever leave a room empty-handed. That is eliminating a ton of that just on a consistent basis. So it never piles up and becomes a lot of work we have to do later. And the last mantra, one that I've been repeating for a long time, I feel like maybe this was from Gretchen Rubin. I think it is a Gretchen Rubin thing that I probably read a million years ago in one of her books. And again, it's repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. It's one of those things that I just say to myself over and over and over again until it becomes an unconscious thought. It's a thought habit. So I think this thought without even realizing it because I force myself to think it so many times. You see what I'm saying? And that is,

if it takes a minute or less, do it now. So if I'm like, I don't know, there's so many examples. if something's like spilled, if it takes a minute to wipe it, do it now. If I have to put something away, if it takes a minute or less, do it now. If I have to make a phone call, if I have to send an email, if I have to do anything, does it take, if I notice something, I'm like, oh, I should do that later. I always want to put in the later. My first thought is, is this going to take a minute or less? because if it takes a minute or less, I got to do it now.

And one of the biggest things is breaking down boxes. I'm real bad for this, friends. I will get an Amazon shipment or even like you get cookies and it's in a box and then you're like done with it. I just want to put it in front of the garbage can or the recycling can and I'll break it down later. But then, you know, I never do. And then it's recycling night and I'm out there for freaking ever with Mount,

with Mount Tower of boxes, redonculus, it takes a minute or less, do it now. It's all there is to it. And this mantra makes me actually grab a knife and slice it and do the whole thing that I don't really want to do. It's everything from in my bathroom, you know, I get ready and I have my makeup all out, and then I'm like, oh, I'm like, it takes less than a minute. Boom, do it now. And again, I don't have to force myself to think these thoughts because I had, I forced

myself to think these thoughts for so long that now it's an unconscious or subconscious, just whatever, thought habit. And these three thought habits, hot lava, never leave a room empty handed. And if it takes a minute or less, do it now. These three things took time for me to an effort to repeat over and over and over again. And I had to have alarms on my phone to remind me and I used a lot of sticky notes with these mantros to put all over the place to remind me to have this thought, have this thought, have this thought, have this thought. But honestly, looking back, it really didn't take long for these to just become something I think without having to force myself anymore. And just changing your mindset, just having these thoughts

is enough to transform the way your home looks. It really is. You still got to get up and do the thing. But sometimes we just forget to remember. Sometimes it just doesn't dawn on us. We're blind to it until it becomes a huge mess. And then we're like, where did this come from? How did this house get so dirty? It slowly crept up, friends, and we didn't even notice. So these three mantras stop that creep from happening. And they allow us to kind of stay on top. So when we do do those extra 15 minutes or 20 minutes of like cleaning, we can actually clean and wipe and make real progress because we don't have to spend a half an hour or an hour tidying first. So I hope you're feeling inspired. I loved hanging out with you. I hope you feel like, yes, I got stuff done today, Cass, and you're feeling

pumped because you're amazing and you deserve it and you deserve to be proud of your home and you deserve a home that is clean and tidy and a reflection of your true self you are an organized person you are a person who is in control of themselves and their home you are amazing and you got this okay and your home needs to reflect your awesomeness thank you guys so much i love hanging out with you and i'll see you guys next time