Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Work Smarter Not Harder | Clutterbug Podcast # 57

Episode Date: June 26, 2018

In todays podcast I'llshare how I take shortcuts with cleaning and organizing, while still maintaining a clean and organized home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. Today we're talking about doing the bare minimum, how we can work smarter and not harder when it comes to our home. So thanks so much for tuning in. Today we're talking about some tips and tricks that we can do to work smarter, not harder when it comes to just the daily stuff that we have to do as part of being an adult. especially when it comes to our home. So you guys know I have three kids. I work from home, but I'm working full-time hours and our kids are involved in a ton of activities. And so I'm really, I hate to say it,

I love my husband, but I'm the one who's really in charge of everything when it comes to the house and the kids. Now, I'm not condoning this. I'm not saying that this is great. But that's the situation that I'm in right now. And the reason that I'm doing most of the housework is because for almost our entire relationship that we've lived together, my husband and I, I've always been the one who stayed home. I stayed home and my job was to look after the kids and the house. And I was always working while staying home, but I was doing daycare. So there was lots of time in my day where the kids were playing and I could throw in a little laundry or quickly vacuum the floor and we made cleanup time part of the daycare fun after lunch every day. So we'd go around and we'd all have little mops and

just clean up the mess from the daycare. And we had a small house. It was only 900 square feet. So when we moved here to the bigger house, I guess I was just in the habit of doing all the housework. Still running the daycare. And then as I started doing the blog, let's be honest, my blog is about cleaning and organizing the house. So again, I took on the majority of that stuff. So that's why I guess I'm in the situation now where I'm doing the majority of the housework. So in charge of laundry and the cleaning and the grocery shopping and the making dinners. It is a lot on my plate when you add to that the fact that I'm working full time. And I have three kids who are involved in a lot of activities. But what I've learned over the years, the more work I've had to do, the more like actual big girl

business stuff I've had to do. I've had to learn how to take shortcuts when it comes to the house. I've had to learn to find little tricks to like just, yeah, half ass. I'm going to say it. Half ass the housework, but still have the same result. So I'm going to share some of those things with you now because it seems overwhelming. And when I look back at how I used to do things, it was overkill. I was doing way more than I needed to do and I'm doing way less now, but still getting the same results. So I want to share those with you now. There are a couple of key things that you have to do every day just to maintain to make sure that things never get out of control. So, I mean, I've tried to find shortcuts on this stuff, but the truth is these are the ones we

just have to do, whether we want to or not. And the first one is laundry with three. five of us living in this house, I have to do at least one load a day. We wash sheets, we wash bedding, we wash towels, we wash the kids' clothes, we wash our clothes. So every single day, a load of laundry has got to be done. So I put it in the morning, I switch it over in the afternoon, and I put it away every night. And I've set reminders in my phone. Still, after all these years, this is something that I have to have a reminder in my phone to make sure that I'm actually doing. And I don't, I mean, I make mistakes. And there are days where I'm like, oh, I just want to lay in bed and do nothing or I'm not feeling well or we're traveling.

And that means extra laundry the next day. That means two loads the next day or three loads if I skip a couple of days. So I can't get away from it. There's no way of shortcutting that. There's also really no way of short cutting dishes. So every time we're done eating a meal, the whole family pitches in to like scrape our plates, rinse them, and load the dishwasher. And the family is involved with emptying the dishwasher too. There's just no way of getting around dishes unless we use paper plates, which sometimes we do.

But dishes is something that is just part of being grown up and getting the kids to help definitely makes it a lot easier. So those are the two things that we have to do no matter what. So I'm just like taking those off the table and let's talk about the rest of the house. One thing that I was totally wasting time doing was vacuuming. Before I had rumbas and even when I first had rumba's, a rumba's a little robot vacuum, I was, you know, vacuuming every single day. The whole house, like a crazy person. And then I got rumbas and I started vacuuming a lot less.

But the problem with a rumba is it's going to like do a lot. light clean, it's not going to tackle a deep down vacuum. It doesn't do stairs. It doesn't do your furniture. It's not great at getting like the crumbs that the kids drop after snack right underneath the chairs around the table, around the island. So I was dragging out my big giant vacuum for this type of stuff. And that's crazy. That's so crazy. So now instead for like those crumbs, I just grabbed like a wet paper towel and and just like spot pick up the crumb. And, and, And I also invested in a really cheap, inexpensive, like plug-in cordless vacuum for those quick little things that I see.

I still run the Rumba every day to get the dust. But I had to take a step back and say, like, man, how can I? I don't want to vacuum the whole house. How can I get rid of these crumbs within the shortest amount of time without having to do a lot of work? And if I left those crumbs there, what ends up happening is they spread all over the house. So there's two approaches, I guess. Some people are like, oh, just leave them, whatever. I'll get them when I vacuum at the end of the week or something. And then that just makes a bigger mess in the long run. More stuff stuck to your feet. It gets tracked through the whole house. It ends up

staining your carpets. But taking out the vacuum and doing it like old school, that's silly too. So now it's like a wet rag for the crumbs when I see it or I use that quick cordless vac. The other thing I cheat on is my mopping. I never like old school scrub my floors ever. I rarely even mop the entire floor. I'm all about the high traffic areas. So I have a spray mop and every single night before bed I just quickly do like the high traffic areas. So down the hall, around the kitchen just where we walk and spill food. And sometimes in the bedrooms like in front of the beds where we walk in the bathrooms. Honestly, it's like five minutes. This isn't a real mop. This is like a squirt, squirt, wipe, wipe quick mop. And my floors are never dirty. It's insane. I think of all the time I wasted like full mopping my floors,

picking up the chairs, you know, I'd turn them upside down and set them on the table and I'd move furniture and mop. There's a time and a place for that, but it certainly isn't on a regular basis. That's like a once a year type thing. And I used to think that was a it part of cleaning that that was an important step to take and it really just isn't it was a waste of my time the other thing now that i do is i never scrub my bathrooms anymore i wipe them down every day like a quick wipe like with a glass cleaner i just wipe the counters i wipe the mirror if the kids have sprayed toothpaste you know what kids do i wipe maybe like the handle drawer fonts if there's goose of toothpaste and i quickly clean the toilet and that's it

A couple of times a week I might spray some cleaner in the shower before I hop in the shower to like wipe down the walls while I'm showering. But there's no scrubbing my friends. There's no there's no like hands and knees deep down cleaning the bathroom. It's a quick wipe. But I think the biggest impact, the biggest cheat shortcut that I do is definitely the tidying. And I'm tidying really quickly a couple of times throughout the day. So we do a quick tidy before dinner.

I just run around and put things back where they have to go in their place. And then I do another quick tidy before bed. And sometimes I'll do a quick tidy after breakfast. You know, the kids have colored, they left their crowns out, or they come home from school and they've got their like schoolwork and backpacks and stuff. That's the quick tidy I'm talking about. And I make the kids quick tidy their rooms at these same times. And quick tidy for me is under five minutes.

under five minutes. But the thing is, if you're doing these quick five-minute tidies multiple times a day, it never gets to the point where it's going to take more than five minutes. It never becomes this overwhelming mess. And clutter attracts clutter. So when we leave the mail on the counter, we leave little piles, or the kids' room is messy for a couple of days, it just expands in this huge amount of mess because we're way more likely to just drop stuff, to leave stuff, to not put things away as we go if we see that things are already messy. And the opposite is also true. If we're constantly doing a quick tidy, we're way more likely to put the peanut butter back in the cabinet when we're done making a sandwich because the rest of the kitchen is pretty tidy.

So that's really the secret to working smarter, not harder, is training yourself to tight. little increments throughout the day and this was hard for me I was in the habit of being messy I was in the habit of like like I said making a peanut butter sandwich and leaving the jelly and the bread and the peanut butter on the counter I wouldn't even like close up the bread bag it would just be like getting stale all day that just wasn't me so that was a habit I was in the habit of being messy so I had to change my habit to tidy as I go and I did that by setting alarms setting reminders and, you know, having them go off and forcing myself to do this quick tidy. And eventually it did become habit.

I just slowly started doing it as a habit. And still my kids are 11, 9, and 5, and I still have to remind them multiple times a day. Okay, it's quick tidy time, quickly tidy your bedroom. And they groan and they don't want to do it. But it never is overwhelming for them because I'm reminding them all the time. and I'm only remembering to remind them because I have reminders in my phone. I put reminders to remind me to take my medication, my kids to remember to take their medications, to remember to feed the dog, to remember to switch over the laundry, and to remember to do these quick five-minute tidies.

I need that for my crazy ADHD brain. I need structure. I need routine and I need a physical reminder to do things that I have to do. so that's that's how i'm getting the basics done that's how that's how i transformed my house from you know a person who first of all was a crazy slab to then someone who over cleaned to now someone who's doing the bare minimum but still maintaining a really clean and clutter-free home and so i had to share those with you i wanted to inspire you today now if you're starting from where i was before where your house is like just crazy messy you're going to

going to have to do the basics. That's the laundry and the dishes and the quick tides throughout the day and then add on the organizing part. And you can do this in 15 minute increments, but you'll also have to do the other stuff too. You're not going to get there in just 15 minutes total. You're still going to have to do the quick tidy maintain and the dishes and the laundry. And then on top of that, spend 15 minutes every day decluttering an area or organize. a drawer or, you know, I don't know, purging 21 items from your closet. I promise you you'll get there. A little bit every day works for two reasons. It works because it's never overwhelming. It's never something that you can't accomplish. So you're feeling pride in yourself, which is going to give you

momentum to keep going. And the other thing that it does when you're doing little bits every day is it's making a new habit. You are the way. you are right now because you're in the habit of being that way. And there's lots of different reasons probably that those habits formed in the first place. You guys know I'm a big believer that everyone organizes differently. And a lot of people fail because they've been trying to organize a way that doesn't work with their brain type. And when you know what does work with your brain type, it's easy then to set up a system that won't fail. But you also have to change the habits as well. you've been in the habit probably of failing so many times that you've just stopped trying and then

you've got in the habit of just leaving stuff when you come in and not picking up after yourself now yes there's a reason that habit was formed in the first place and we can correct that initial thing that caused the bad habit but we also have to correct the bad habit and make a new positive habit so that's how you do it that's how you do it guys you work smart Harder. Not harder. You look for those shortcuts. You can still get everything done to the same level that you want without having to bust your butt doing it or take a lot of time or effort. Your time is important. I want to save you time. I want you to still love and take pride in your home, but not kill yourself to get there. You shouldn't have to and you shouldn't do it.

So I hope you guys enjoyed. I hope you're feeling motivated to. to make yourself a new, I don't know, list of easy, quick tasks that you can do to tackle your home and start some new good habit routines. And that's all. I'm rambling. Thanks so much for listening, and I will see you guys next time.