Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Tough Love - House Cleaning Motivation | Clutterbug Podcast # 256

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Sometimes we all need a little kick in the pants to help us get started. In today's podcast I'm giving you a little house cleaning tough love to motivate and jumpstart your 2025 journey towards a beautifully organized home.   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 #organizedlife Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to kick your house's butt today? Are you ready to clean and declutter and make a difference and make yourself proud because you deserve a tidy organized home for 2025? Let's do this. Hey, clutterbugs, welcome back to the clutterbug podcast. It's the first podcast of 2025. So I'm going to bring a little bit of tough love because I know you want this. I know you are sick of the mess and the clutter and just always having to clean and it never feels like it stays clean. So let's say, do something about it. Let's put on our capes and be the superheroes of our own life. Let's rescue our house because nobody else is coming to do it. Let's get real about that. Nobody's coming to clean. Nobody's coming to d-de-clutter. Nobody's coming to organize. It is you. You are the boss. You have all the power to make all the difference. And if you don't like the way things are going, that's your responsibility to change it. And I'm bringing a little tough love because I think so often I know for myself I need a kick in

the pants when it comes to the things that I drag my feet on because I will make all the excuses. I will justify why I can wait until tomorrow or why I need other people to help me or why life isn't fair. I can very easily fall into the victim mentality, which doesn't get me anywhere. except sad. But it's also just as easy to pull myself out and become the hero. And so today, all of us, we are being the heroes of our lives. And I'm going to give you some ideas of something that you can do right now that will make a big impact. But I also don't want to take away from,

if you already had ideas, from the things you want to get done. Maybe you have dishes that you need to catch up on or laundry. Cuckoo-cool. You do you, boo. But, But I think there is something that you can do and should do this week that is going to make a huge impact on your home and your life. So I'm going to jump into that. Then we're going to talk a little bit about North Star planning, how to pick a big goal for 2025. That's not a New Year's resolution.

How to kind of toss your to-do list in the trash. I still like a to-do list. But I'm going to show you a different way to plan. And we're going to hopefully just make a big difference today in a half an hour together. and at the end of it, we can be like, yeah, look what I did, I'm amazing, and kind of set the mojo, set the tone for the entire year. Okay, so here's something that you can do, and I think you should do whether you're doing it right now or you're going to do it later on this week, and that is rezone your food in your kitchen. I talk a lot about the most important thing when it comes

to organization is proper zoning. And I think all of us naturally do this. when we first set up our kitchen, we have all the food together and we have all the dishes together and we have all the food storage containers together. But what often happens, especially with food, is as we're going grocery shopping and we're bringing things in, maybe there's not space for the canned goods you bought with the other canned goods. So you're kind of just stashing things wherever it can fit. Or if you're like me and you have kids and they're just kind of rummaging. It's really easy for things to get mixed up and kind of all over the place when it comes to your food. So I would love you to take right now or later this week,

if you're doing something else, you just do something, friend. No sitting on the couch aloud. No just passively listening or watching this. Get up and be amazing. Okay? Really, seriously. You want this or not? Do you want to change and have a better system and a better system and a better house and a better life or not. The choice is up to you. And if the answer is, yeah, I want things to change and I want my life easier and I want to be happier, you've got to make that happen. So get up and let's go. Do something, anything. I don't care that pushes the needle forward. But when it comes to zoning our food, what's a really helpful thing that you can do is literally to go to where you store food, whether it's a pantry or multiple cabinets, whatever it is,

and do something I say to never do, but today you're going to do it, and it's take it out. And you can do one category at a time or one shelf at a time, but why it's even more effective to just literally take all of it out is because you may have canned vegetables in one cabinet and also some in another cabinet and also some in the Costco closet around the corner. Where are all your snacks? Are they all together? where are all your baking supplies? Are they all together? So when I talk about zoning food, I don't mean that everything that you have food related has to be in one place because that's not

overly realistic. I don't have all of my food in one place. I just don't have a big enough space for that, but I do have all the cereal together, all the breakfast items together, all the kids' school snacks together. I have all the soups together, all the crackers together, all the canned vegetables together, all the pasta sauces together, all the pastas and rice together. And it's very easy for this to kind of become undone through the weeks, through the months, if you haven't done this in a year. And you have things all over the place, which means you don't really know what you have. Things are probably getting lost, forgotten about, or expiring. And this is so simple to fix this. You are literally just going to pull things out and then put them back together, zone them back together,

gather the categories and give those categories a home. And this is also a great time to look at your kitchen a little differently and say, well, we use the snacks most of the time. So that's going to get the most valuable real estate. Take the pre-packaged snacks out of the boxes and put them all together. If you have an extra, I don't know, food storage container that's large. sitting around, grab it and put all the prepackaged snacks in this. This isn't about spending money. This isn't about coming up with some complicated organizing system or decanting all your pastas

and legumes into different containers. That's ridiculous. This is about zoning. This is about working with what you have to make your food more functional. To create a system that's easier to see, find and put away the food that you have. End stop. We're not spending money right now. We're not worried about looking at Pinterest for inspiration because nobody on Pinterest has the same food that you have or the same food storage system that you have.

They have different pantries, different cabinets. We're not copying anyone. This is about good enough to move on, spending 20 minutes to just make your food storage better, which means, You got to haul your butt, man, and go as fast as possible. So pull it out, pull it out, pull it out, pull it out. Don't sort it as you pull.

Just pull it out. Pull it out. We're going to wipe down the inside of the cabinets, lickety split. We're not laying down contact paper. We're not doing fancy things here. Speed is of the essence. We are just making it better. And then we're putting things back in a more organized manner.

Not worried again about. going all crazy micro. One shelf is for this or one section is for this category and so on and so forth. And then shopping your stuff, grabbing all those type of categories and putting it away. If you come across something expired, we're pitching it in the trash. Done. Are we worried today about super duper amazing recycling and rinsing out all the containers? Probably not. If you really want to, fine put all the things that have to be cleaned out by the sink and then right back to the zoning we're not getting distracted we're not leaving the room we are focusing and if you have extras in your Costco corner like we do sometimes we'll buy something and like coffee and for some reason we buy like

7000 k cups from Costco and it doesn't all fit in our coffee cabinet so like shop that section I'm going to go into the closet, pull out those extra cake cups, and refill the coffee cabinet. Or add the extra cookies that were way too big to fit in the pantry. Now I have room for those extra cookies to go. So shop your stuff, do some rezoning, make your food more functional. This is such an easy, fast thing that you can do to set the tone for 2025. And then I want you to literally do this in every space in your house. Not today.

Not today, but going forward, food is a really easy one to start because the categories are really obvious. But your entire home should be set up like this. All your batteries should be together in one spot contained batteries in like a battery basket. All your light bulbs, all your cleaning supplies, all your extra rags, all your extra I don't know. Gosh, you can tell I didn't really plan what I was going to talk about today because I don't have set examples for you, but everything from your spices to your socks to your camisoles to your whatever zoned and has a home. Everything is zoned and everything has a home.

And zoned means all that category is together. Isn't a little bit here and sprinkled there and sprinkled there and sprinkled over here. We're doing that. And you can do this for your paper because It doesn't matter how many homes I go to to organize. The chronically disorganized people have important documents sprinkled everywhere, memories everywhere, just like bills and papers, kind of everywhere. Gather it, contain it, give it a home, move on. And do some decluttering while you're at it, which would be great too. But the zoning is such an important and critical aspect of organization that I think

gets really overlooked. We can get distracted by trying to make things look Pinterest perfect or whatever and what kind of containers and should we put everything in rainbow colors and what should we buy to create more storage that we forget that the true meaning of organization is that it's supposed to just make our life easier. The thing that really got me hooked on home organization was that I am kind of lazy there. I'm just going to say, say it and I'm trying to get rid of the L word in my life because it's seen as like this negative thing but the truth is I don't want to spend a lot of time doing things that I don't enjoy doing. And so I made it my mission when I was going from super slob to trying to get my life under

control to come up with systems that felt effortless because in my messiest moments when I was really struggling with a ton of clobb. and chronic disorganization, I was spending so much time looking for things. I was wasting hours just stuff shuffling. I'd have to move stuff off the table to use the table. I'd have to search around for the bills that had to be paid. I would have to do dishes before I could cook a meal. Like it was crazy how much time I was wasting just managing my mess. And then I became obsessed with how can I just save time, save time, save time. And the biggest time wasteer for me was clutter and having stuff all over the place and having

to look for things. There wasn't one day when I was chronically disorganized that I didn't have to look and hunt for something, not one day. And it was horrible and I hated it. And I remember this feeling of panic, whether I was looking for that extra shoe for my daughter before we were going to a party or the umbrella because it was raining or my phone or the keys to the car or that bill that I knew I had to pay. It was always and endless.

And all of that is gone. And so when I talk about getting your house under control, it isn't so it looks good when company comes over because who cares? Frankly, I don't have company that comes over very often anyways. It isn't like how it looks is a bonus. How it functions is the. real goal here. And the fact that I get to wake up in the morning and come down the stairs to a clean kitchen and feel that feeling of like, that is just a cherry on top. It really is. And there are

added benefits. And I do want to talk about that as you're kicking your house's butt right now. Let's talk about all the reasons why, even though it sucks in this moment, it's going to be so freaking worth it. And the time saving for me is number one. because I always felt like there wasn't enough time in the day. I always felt so rushed and hectic. And then I also felt like guilt and shame when I took time to rest and watched a movie or just laid around and did nothing. It felt like, ooh, I shouldn't be doing this.

I should be cleaning. I should be doing my dishes. I should be putting away the laundry. And so I never really felt relaxed and recharged because there was this never ending nagging stuff all the time. So eliminating all of that, it gave me more me time. It gave me more actual time to enjoy the me time and not just escape the stuff I had to do. So that was key. But the other thing, the other benefit of like radically reducing the amount of stuff I had in my house, radically changing my organizing systems that work with how I naturally organize. What came out of that was time,

also motivation. Because nothing kills your motivation more than walking into a space that is trashed. You don't feel like cleaning it. You don't feel like doing anything at all. It zaps you of all your physical and emotional and even spiritual energy. clutter and mess and chaos just is soul crushing friends you know what i did when i had a messy house nothing but exist i existed from one moment to the next and i didn't ever accomplish any really bigger things i didn't even have hobbies that i enjoyed i wasn't doing anything except existing and I didn't even realize that my house was a big reason for that. I thought it was,

I had depression and I thought I know I still have anxiety, like anxiety and it was just, I was busy and that's adulthood and there's never enough time in the day and blah, blah, blah. I didn't realize until the stuff was gone or contained and organized how much I was missing out on life because I wasn't feeling that zest. I wasn't feeling inspired. I wasn't feeling motivated. I wasn't feeling happy.

I wasn't feeling excited. I certainly wasn't feeling proud of myself. I wasn't feeling good. So how could I do or want to do anything good? And that was like so impactful because as soon as I got my home under control, then I was inspired to get my finances under control and reliance. and relationships under control. And I was inspired to start a business and I started crafting and I had like 50 billion

hobbies and I was reading books and I was doing all this truly fulfilling stuff in my life that even though I wanted to do before, it never felt possible because I never felt inspired or motivated to actually do those things. So I know I talk a lot about my house. I do. And you're probably like, whoa, she's just like obsessed with cleaning her house. That's the opposite, friends. I just see the correlation.

I spend very little time actually cleaning my house. But it is a top priority in my life that it stays maintained clutter-free and pretty tidy and not gross. Like it's cleanish. one of the top priorities in my life. Why? Because I know it affects every other area of my life. It is, my home is the foundation for my life. It needs to be solid. It needs to be, I need to be in control of it so I can stack everything else on top. Family time, fun, activities, good finances. all of that is easier when my house is under control. So yeah, I'm super passionate about it because I spent a long time trying to get all of

these things under control all at the same time and like failing, like juggling a bunch of balls that I was dropping. And it wasn't until I said enough is enough. Come on, man. This is ridiculous. And I got a trash bag and I started filling it with stuff that didn't matter that I, that I had real change. I had to let go of that, ooh, this feels wasteful or, oh, I spent money on this, or, oh, what if I need this in the future?

All of that paled in comparison to my need for freedom from my home, for my need for self-confidence, for my need for self-esteem. I needed to do other crap with my life, and I couldn't do that when I had the clutter as a roadblock. So yeah, I had to fill so many. I mean, I could have filled a dumpster, the biggest dumpster, easily. And I'm still decluttering on a regular basis because that's part of life, just like you've got to vacuum your floors. You got to get rid of stuff. But no one ever teaches us this. We did not see this from our parents.

they had a lot less stuff. It was a lot harder to come across things. Now we got a target on every corner. Amazon delivers next day. Sometimes the same day, depending on where you live. So it's so much easier to acquire. So we need to let go at a much faster rate than our families ever did. And my parents, when they got rid of things,

they just really put it in the attic or the shed. And now my mom's downsizing. and she has 60 years worth of crap and she's overwhelmed and she's exhausted and she wishes it wasn't there. Do not wait until you're 70 years old to deal with it. Today is the day. Ruthless. If you don't use it, if you don't love it, if it isn't serving a purpose, why the heck is it in your house, man? You deserve better.

It's taken up space. It's taking up mental space that you could be using for way cooler stuff. It doesn't matter if it fits. I don't even care if you have the room. Do you have the room in your brain? Because everything you keep is something you have to remember. It's something you have to know where it is. It's something you are in charge of.

It is a little employee that you have to manage. Friends, I don't know about you, but I don't have the capacity to manage 50 million things. I just don't. I want better for myself. So as you're listening, I got off on a little rant there. I get really passionate about this because I want this so badly for you because of how much this one thing changed my life. And it really did.

That's why I'm so passionate because I lived for so long with mess and disorganization and clutter and just hating housework, it being such a chore. And when I started caring about my house more and making it a priority, every other aspect of my life improved dramatically. And I didn't know why, but it was really obvious, crazy obvious. Like it was dramatic, but I had to make dramatic steps in order to see that benefit. I had to let go of like 50 trash bags, you know, to see.

see it. It wasn't just one box. It wasn't just one little bag. I was like, I decluttered last week. And you got rid of like, you know, a grocery bag size. That's not going to, that's doing nothing. What are we talking about? This is radical. You want to make big changes. You've got to make big steps. You got to take big action. Okay. Let's really also talk about change in action and steps because it is overwhelming. You are in the habit of living the way you are living right now. However that is, whether your house is clean and tidy and organized or it isn't, whether you work out all the time or you don't, whether you engage in hobbies or you save money or you spend a bunch, whatever it is. However you are living right now is a habit. There is muscle memory, there is unconscious, just doing the same thing over and over again. And in order to change, we have to create and change our habits, which is very hard. It's hard. But it isn't impossible. and I am not a person with a lot of self-discipline. I am not great at structure.

If I write myself like a plan and everything, I'm not so great of following through and I get very distracted and I tend to give up on things quite easily. So how did I change? And how do I continue to make big goals and achieve them. And I want to share that with you. And I made a video about this. And that came out a couple of weeks ago on my YouTube channel. I definitely, I talk about this in our

organizing experts, live training that we do on Wednesday nights. But I want to talk about it with you again because I feel like even if you've heard this concept, I really want to just hammer it home one more time because I think it could be helpful for you. And it's helps me because it helps me because of the way my brain works, everybody is different. So if this doesn't resonate with you, I totally understand and do whatever does resonate with you and whatever does work for you. If you're the type of person that sets a New Year's resolution and sticks with it, amazing. That's so good for you. I am not that person. I am, I have never in my life stuck with a New Year's resolution ever. But what I have done,

is achieved really big things using a goal planning system that I call North Star. And I just recently started calling this North Star when I was trying to explain it to a group of entrepreneurs that I meet with every month. But I think I didn't even know this was a thing that I was doing until I started looking back at my calendar and realizing this was a thing. and I was sitting in this group with these incredible ADHD entrepreneurs, and one of them is the most productive human being I've ever encountered in my life. He is doing insanely big things.

He's written, I think, 12 New York Times best-selling books. Like, the guy is nuts, okay? And he has super ADHD. And he is developing this brand new event called NeurK. neurodiversion. It's neurodiversion 2025 because we were sitting in this group talking about how much traditional ADHD events suck. Most of us had met at this event called Chad, which is for ADHD. And it was so boring. Like I'm like, why is there no jugglers? Why are we learning about ADHD strategies while sitting quietly in a two-hour session while somebody talks with a crappy, boring PowerPoint?

point. Like, know your audience, friends. And we were talking about how we need sessions to be to the point and short and interesting and we need engaging things and we need people to show us with like their hands and like actual working models of how to do these different things. And he was like, yeah, we should have an event like this. Like six months later, he made it. He did. And I'm like, dude, how are you so? productive and he said that he does the one a day planning, which is every day he has one small task that has a completion that he does, not on weekends, but like every day he does a small, even if it's five minutes or ten minutes, something with a completion.

And he plans that out every single day. And then I was really struck because I was like, I also do this. I do this in my business and I do this in my home. So every day I have a task that I do that has a finish and I plan every day. There's a I love to do list. I got to do list for other things. But baked into my calendar on my phone and baked into my paper calendar that's on my desk, it's one thing a day that's like a non-negotiable.

And this isn't about eating your frog. This isn't like block planning. I can do it any time I want throughout the day. there's no pressure, but this is a must-do before I go to bed no matter what. It isn't even on my to-do list because it isn't a I want to do it. Like I think of a to-do list as all the things I would like to accomplish in a day. My North Star task is something I have to do. Like I have to get out of bed.

I have to put on clothes. I have to eat. I have to do my North Star. End stop. Does it like non-negotiable? And so this has to be a small enough task that I can actually complete it and still have time for a bunch of other things, even if that's Netflix. You know what I'm saying?

So how do you do a North Star planning? How do you pick your North Star? You think about your big goal and vision. Maybe yours is you want a house. that is clean and organized and tidy, and it feels effortless. That is such a good North Star, because that means every day you get to have a baby North Star goal, like I'm going to declutter five things today. I'm going to organize my pens today.

Today I'm going to take the leftovers out of the fridge. Tomorrow, I'm going to zone my food. Zone the food. It has to be small things. It can't be organized your whole. bedroom. That's crazy. It has to be like, I'm going to organize my t-shirts. And here's the thing. You might get inspired and do like a bunch of other things too and organize the whole bedroom. And that's fine. That's amazing. Yay, gold star for you. But you've done your North Star. That's all that matters. And maybe

you've done like four in one day. So then you have to renegotiate tomorrow's North Star and that's fine. The whole point here is consistency, which builds habits. It's about daily making something a priority until it becomes an unconscious habit, to the point where I've had old North stars that I no longer have to do the daily planning for because they are now unconscious habits. My house is the example. I now will do one thing for my house every day without me having to put it even on here because it's just I have done that for so long that I know that it's a priority, that I know that's my North Star. So now I'm able to have another North Star. And 2024's North Star was firefighting. So every day I would do a little something, whether it was

researching, spending five minutes learning about something new, completely. a chapter of school, doing some squats because I didn't have any lower body strength. You know what I mean? North Star become a firefighter, little tiny task baked in every day, every single day. Until that becomes just an unconscious habit, I now listen to Firefighting podcast, and I follow it on social media, and I have books that I read, and I'm doing the little exercises I need to do without even thinking or forcing myself to do them because again, North Star baking it in, which means for for 2025, I get a new North Star. I get a new North Star and a whole new thing, but I don't let go of any of my old North Stars. They are still there and they follow with me at all times because they are now

part of my life, part of my identity. And I did that with consistency, daily tiny things. You take your big North Star and you break it down and you every day do one tiny baby step towards it. And where I think a lot of people struggle is they've got 50,000 North Stars all at once. I want to lose five pounds and I want to save money and I want to get my house under control and I want to spend more time with my family and I want to blah blah blah blah blah if you are trying to create new habits around all of these things and you are being pulled in five different directions it's going to be impossible a north star is one it is the direction that is the most important thing that you focus on of where you want to go in your life it is you are steering your ship in one

direction and you need to know, is it north, is it south? Where is this? It's north because it's your North Star. My point is, you've probably heard how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? Identifying a North Star is like, how do you eat an entire zoo? You got to pick one animal and eat that first, one bite at a time. What are you starting with? What's your North Star for 2025 and then what are you doing every single day? And I don't want you to put things like, I'm going to clean for an hour. That is not a baby North Star goal. That is, that's too big. I'm going to clean something for 15 minutes. Can you get even more detailed? I'm going to clean the windows this day. I'm going to clean the bathroom this day. And if you really hate that level

of structure, I feel your friends. Fine. 15 minutes of cleaning is fine, but you better set a timer. you better do it, really do it. What time are you doing that? And get up and make it happen every single day. Because this is a priority to you. And you have to train your brain and teach your brain that this is a priority for you. And if it hasn't been in the past, you are not in the habit of making this a priority. And you got to fake it till you make it, friend.

You got to force yourself to do that. and one a day or North Star, whatever you want to call it, is the secret. Because consistency is how you do insanely big things without it feeling like you have to change yourself as a person and become this crazy, hardworking person with a bunch of self-discipline. You don't have to do that. You don't have to change one thing about yourself. You just have to commit to five, ten, or fifteen minutes a day working towards the same

goal. It's amazing, friends. It's the secret. I say this all of them. Life-changing secrets, but it's true. It's true. What do you want to change? Who do you want to be in this new year? What is important to you? And maybe it isn't your home. Maybe that's not your North Star. Maybe it's health and fitness. Maybe it's finances. Maybe it's a relationship with a loved one. It doesn't matter what it is. The same technique works for every single one of them. Identify your big North Star and then think about baby things that you can do every day and every day can be the same. Every day can be something different and get yourself a freaking calendar

or put it in your phone and start scheduling. And you never, ever, ever skip a North Star goal in a day. It is a non-negotiable. And when you feel like you finally achieved whatever that goal is, and you get to pick a new North Star goal. But your old one doesn't go away. You carry it with you for the rest of your life. So I hope you're feeling inspired. I hope you did something amazing in your home today. Whether that's fill one trash bag, zoning your food, doing your dishes, doing your laundry,

all of it counts. You are not going to transform your entire house in a day or even a weekend. It is not going to change long. long term until you consistently long term put in the work. And before you know it, you're going to be doing it without even realizing it. You won't have to force yourself. It won't feel like work anymore and every day will get easier. You will no longer have to move things off your table to eat dinner. You will no longer have to wash dishes before you can cook. You will no longer have to take things off your bathroom counter before you can wipe them. Everything will be easier. You won't

lose things. You'll know where everything is. You won't feel overwhelmed. You won't be buying things you already have. Your home will feel easy. And you will wake up in the morning and you will walk into your kitchen and it will be clean and sparkly and you will be able to feel like, what am I going to do today? Whatever the heck I want. You are free from the guilt and the shame and the burden of your home. It is now not another thing on your chore to-do list. It is something that makes life easier for you. It is something that just brings you happiness and joy. And it isn't always like that because like I still got to do dishes and laundry and I hate that.

But it's so fast now because I'm in the habit of doing it. But yeah, the suckage is like 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. It's like little baby amounts of suck. I'm not saying it's all like la la la, sunshine and rainbows. There's still suckage going on. But overall, 99% of it is just isn't work. And I want that for you. But it takes work to get to the no work part.

And then it takes daily little bits of work to stay there. It's worth it. You deserve it. It is the shortcut. Get off your freaking butt and do it. That's the shortcut. That's how life gets easier. Procrastinating, waiting until tomorrow, waiting until you feel like it,

hoping someone else does it, that's the hard. way, friends. Feels like it's easier. It's not. It's a lie and it's a trap that is going to keep you miserable and messy and just not living up to your potential. You want a better life? Get up and make one. Do the work. You're worth it. You deserve it and you don't have, you don't have to spend more than a few minutes a day to make it happen. But you do got to do it every day. Okay, friends, hope you're feeling inspired. You are amazing and I am so proud of you. And I'm going to see you back here next week.

And we are going to do amazing things together because 2025 is our year. I'll see you guys then.