The Lazy Genius Podcast - #334 - How to Create a Relaxing Home Routine

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

I am aware of the irony of using the word “relaxing” when it comes to a home routine, especially during this time of year which tends to be on the busier side. However, I’m into it. It’s more about having enough of a structure to call it a routine but with a perspective that helps us relax around what we’re actually doing.   Helpful Companion Links Episode #145: How to Hire a Housecleaner Episode #254: Chores I Do Every Day Sign up for the Latest Lazy Listens email. Grab a copy of my book The Lazy Genius Kitchen or The Lazy Genius Way! (Affiliate links) Download a transcript of this episode.   This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi there, you are listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I am Kendra Adachi, and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 334, how to create a relaxing home routine. I am aware of the irony of using the word relaxing when it comes to a home routine, especially during this time of year, which tends to be on the busier side. However, I'm kind of into it. I am into pursuing a relaxing. home routine, especially if we frame it as feeling mentally relaxed. It's not that we're moving slowly or we're taking our time or even that we're feeling like exceptionally calm when we're doing things in our homes. It's more about having enough of a structure to call it a routine, but with a perspective that helps us relax around what we're actually doing. I'm really excited to talk about this actually. I think it's a pretty special topic. So let's get into it. I'm going to start with a few overarching principles for you to think about, and then we'll get into some practical specifics. Okay. Now, if we were in like sixth grade English class learning to write a five

paragraph essay, our main idea today is that your home is in a cycle. Your home is in a cycle, always. What happens in your home is always on some kind of loop. That means that not everything is going to be clean all at once, nor should it. If your home is in a cycle, you should have a reasonable expectation that it will not remain static. There's always a flow. We're going to dive a little deeper into those home cycles, but let this premise be your permission. Your home is in a cycle, and it's wonderful to embrace that rather than force rigidity into a place you're really not going to get it. You can be kind to yourself by noticing where you are in your home cycle and embracing that. What a gift that is.

Now, you might be like, what do you mean a cycle? What does that mean? My guess is that most of us have some of the same home cycles. Let's look at laundry. Laundry for sure is in a cycle. It is rare that every piece of fabric in your house will be cleaned and put away all at the same time, right? You and your family, if you live with a family, are not going to be hanging out naked on laundry day. They're literally clothes that are dirty on the bodies while other

clothes are getting clean. So laundry lives in a cycle. Stuff gets dirty. It waits to get washed. You wash it. You wash it a second time if you forgot to dry it. You dry it. You maybe fold it or leave it in the basket. You put it away or leave it in the basket for people to pull from and then you do it again and again and again and again. Laundry lives in a cycle and you're always in it because you're always wearing clothes. Okay. How about food? Food is also in a cycle. You have to decide what to eat. You have to buy stuff, put it away, prep it, cook it, clean it up, and do it again. Multiple times a day. That is a cycle we're all very familiar with. What about tidying and cleaning your house? This one has less obvious steps, but it's still a cycle. You know, you live life in a room. The life gets all over the floor and the

surfaces. You eventually tidy the life. You might clean up some dirt sometimes, but you just keep living, right? And it happens again and again and again. Recognizing that your home is in not just one cycle, but in multiple cycles, is to me really freeing. It helps me understand, why I can sometimes feel overwhelmed by all there is to do in my home. There are a lot of cycles moving at once and at different speeds. And sometimes the hardest part of each cycle conflates into one moment. And that's when you get big black trash bag energy or BBTBE, which is not an acronym that flies off the tongue. But we'll leave it. Anyway, so what does this knowledge mean for us. How can we leverage this understanding of our home being in a constant series of cycles?

I think we can use that to create a relaxing home routine, which honestly might sound counterintuitive. I just said that multiple cycles are happening at once, and now I'm like, that's so relaxing. Can those two things go together? I think they can. One day, you're negotiating with suppliers. The next, you're installing a shelf in the back room. a business means moving in many directions all the time. TD's new small business banking accounts are built for how your business moves. It's how we're making banking more human. Aw isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me

for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe. wonder and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay, to put this in real, real time context, I guess. I want to share with you three of my specific routines. And after you hear me share those, I would encourage you to do this for yourself, sketch out your own home cycles to see where you can make them feel less stressful and notice where they sometimes run into each other in a less than relaxing way. And I'll give you kind of a process for that at the end. But first let me tell you about our laundry, our laundry routine. We have a normal cycle like everyone else, right? I already said what that, what big laundry's cycle is. It's wear

clothes, store them, wash them, dry them, put them away, do it again. But everyone has a specific way they handle that, right? Kind of a specific routine, maybe. This is ours. So first, first thing that's really important to say is that cause takes care of the laundry. My husband takes care of the laundry. In our division of labor, he is the laundry captain. He really cares about laundry. I don't, so he does it. Usually on Saturday, he gathers up all the laundry from all the rooms, sorts them, and begins washing everything. Frankly, they're kind of already sorted because everybody has their own individual baskets, but you know. So we are a once-a-week laundry family, for the most part. That is the routine that works best for us in this season. So Kaz gets everything

clean and dry. And then he puts the kids clean clothes, like unfolded straight from the dryer, back into their individual laundry baskets, which is easy because each kid gets their own load. So it's just pull it out of the dryer and put it in the basket. And he's very smart. So we have three of those fabric circle bins, you know, with a handle that are sold literally everywhere. There's like nothing special about the baskets that we use. But he leaves each kid's basket in our dining room, like the one that we don't eat in very

much, which is right next to our washer and dryer. and we generally have to prompt kids to get their basket and take it to their room, you know, Sam, my teenager, he does not put his laundry away. He pulls clothes out of his basket and only goes to his drawers when his basket is empty. Like that's how he gets his clean clothes is just straight from his laundry basket. That is the cycle he has chosen. And honestly, that's fine with me. Like, whatever.

Ben, my middle kid, he will usually dump his clean clothes onto his floor and he will pull from them each day, which I don't love. and I will sometimes prompt him on Monday or Tuesday, you know, a couple days after laundry's done, to put his clothes away, especially if he's stepping on the clean ones, you know? Now, Annie, my youngest, she hates putting away laundry. And I don't blame her. So we tend to put her laundry away together, or she does it with my mom when my mom babysits the kids every Tuesday afternoon. Okay, so that's the kids.

And then Kaz puts his own clothes away, but then he kind of gathers and folds mine, and then I put mine away. Now, I'm working on this episode on a Tuesday. Laundry was done on Saturday. And my folded clothes have been in a pile on our dresser since Saturday. I have not put them away yet. Now, does that pile contribute to my bedroom feeling a little more scattered than I'd like? It does. Is my bedroom also during the season of life in utter chaos because half of it is covered in plastic since our primary bathroom is being renovated. Yes, that is true. So in this season, I'm less concerned about getting my laundry put away right away because it doesn't really contribute to any cleanliness in the room that much. So I'm in no rush. But ultimately, laundry in our house is not actively happening

Tuesday through Friday, right? The cycle is somewhat dormant then. All we're doing is adding to the dirty clothes pile. Okay. So that's our laundry routine, our laundry cycle. Another cycle that we have, actually, that's our laundry. I'll get into this in a minute, but that's our laundry routine. The cycle is the same no matter what, but our routine of how we handle that cycle is different. Okay. So another cycle that we all have is food. Our routine for the food is as follows. So 90% of the time I plan meals for the following week on a Sunday. and I make a grocery list. I usually schedule a grocery delivery from Monday morning.

And then we just like live and eat and do the thing all week. Now almost always we have to get a second midweek delivery of like milk and fruit, whatever else we've run out of because we have five people in the house. One of them being a teenage boy. So food goes fast around here. And then I'm back to planning on Sunday. Now if when I look at the upcoming week or if the, the fridge is like full of things that need some bizarre food prep, which you can read about on my

website, bazaar a food prep. Or if I just feel like cooking on a quiet Saturday, you know, that's going to be like a sweet, rainy Saturday and I feel like cooking, then I will plan the following week's food on Friday instead of Sunday. And I'll schedule the groceries for Saturday morning so that I can prep some meals on Saturday morning. That is our, that's kind of our food routine. Okay. The final cycle that I'll mention is our house being clean. So I've talked about this in a separate episode about hiring a house cleaner, but we do have a house cleaner who comes every two weeks to clean our house with the exception of the kids' bedrooms, because I cannot deal with having to fully tidy their spaces to prepare for cleaning. That is not my journey. There's just this

whole thing about getting your house ready to be cleaned. It has to be pretty tidy for the cleaning to be effective. And I don't know if you have been in a kid's bedroom lately, but that is not a battle I'm going to fight. So this is our kind of cleaning routine. We keep the L. You've heard me mentioned tidying the L. So we keep the L, which is our main living area in the kitchen that's sort of in the shape of an L. That's why we call it that. We keep that fairly tidy. It's part of our daily routine. I talk about that in episode 254, chores I do every day. So that's that space is rarely out of control. It's never more than one quick tidy away from being mostly fine because we tend to it daily, right? Now, that is not the case everywhere else in the house.

Other spaces, primarily my bedroom and the big dining table in our dining room that I just mentioned when I was talking about laundry, those are the catch-alls. There is no real rhythm there. The cycle in those rooms is to clean it all completely and then keep filling it up until there's a reason to clean it all completely again. It's okay to have rooms like that, by the way. So we tidy the L every day and the rest of the home just kind of gets lived in. Then usually on a Tuesday night, I am feeling a little squirrelly at the relative chaos that has built up in other parts of the house. And I'll do a quick tidy across the board. Nothing major. It's just kind of a walkthrough in the house. It's rarely a full tidy. And sometimes the room doesn't even look much.

different than it did, but it's a little better. I'm happy with a little better. Now, our house cleaner comes every Thursday or every other Thursday, which means that every other Wednesday, the house has to be ready to go before we go to bed. So if I am in a cleaning week, if I'm in a house cleaner week, that Tuesday night kind of chaotic tidy will be more thorough in preparation for having the house ready to be cleaned. Right? I'm getting. I'm getting a getting things closer to ready so that when we do our full family tidy on Wednesday to get ready for our house cleaner, it's not as overwhelming. But ultimately, we keep 20% of our home in a daily cleaning routine. Really, it's tidying. It's not even cleaning. And then the rest piles up until it has

to be tended to. And that tending is generally when the house cleaner is coming. Okay. Now, this is where the rubber meets the road. And you can see in your own life how your home cycles could be adjusted to be more relaxing. There are times when your home cycles and the routines with which you handle them all run into each other. That happens for us on the occasional Sunday. We sometimes host our church community group for dinner on Sunday nights. And if you recall, Sunday is where a lot of our cycles are a pretty big stalemate, you know, laundry is out. because that's when the laundry cycle is active. So clothes are in piles. Maybe they're being washed, but they're, you know, they're not put away yet. Sunday is when I meal plan. But if I'm also serving

dinner to 40 people, my kitchen feels a little stressed, you know, it is not a relaxing place if I'm also planning for the week on the same day. And if people are coming over on a Sunday, especially if it's in an off week from our house cleaner coming, there are piles in many places. Now, I'm I am not embarrassed to leave those piles out, not at all. Like, we live in piles. Like, that's part of life sometimes. It's okay. But if those piles are all over the dining table, which is generally where the piles are,

and we need people to, like, eat at that table, it's a good idea to take care of the piles, you know? So our typical home cycles, they sometimes have a bit of a three-car pile up on Sundays. Now, how do we avoid that? if you name what your individual home cycles are and then you notice that a lot of the routines that you might have around those cycles are happening at the same time, that those cycles are bumping into each other in a stressful way, you can adjust your cycles. You can pull this one back a little. You can push that one forward a little. And now you've added more relaxation to your home

routine. Now, your home, it does not have to be perfectly clean and tidy and, you know, meals prepped and everything washed and put away all at once to feel relaxed. That is, again, not the point here. You as a person can feel more relaxed when you notice where you are in your home cycles. Remember, staying grounded is better than staying on task. Learning to be with yourself and be okay when things aren't okay, that is so much better. Doing that is so much better than stressing yourself out even more, trying to clean everything and make everything amazing or follow certain rules you think you should in order to get the result of a clean house. I just don't think that's sustainable.

So instead of using your limited energy to create a relaxing home, use that energy to engage in home routines. while staying relaxed on the inside, being fluid on the inside. And a relaxing home, like an actual home, that's going to follow. It's how you see it. So remember, your home will always be in a cycle. You will never have everything done at once, ever. And even if you do, even if there's this like what feels like a magical moment where everything's done at once, that's when you get all weird about other people in the

house, you won't let anybody wear shoes or eat something crumbly on the couch or, you know, pull out a game because the surface is finally clear and the game cabinet is finally organized or whatever. We hold on to order if we force it into place. And that holding on is what causes the stress in our bodies and even in our relationships with the people that we might live with. So instead, if you embrace that your home is always in a cycle, that it's always holding multiple cycles that are at different points in their journey and that you can adjust those cycles

in small ways each week or even in the moment. You will relax more in your home. And then because you are relaxed, again, a relaxing home itself will follow. So if you're feeling encouraged by this possibility, but you're also like, well, what do I do? How do I make this work in my own home? Here are some quick steps to consider. All right. First, name. your home cycles. What things are in a cycle? Not necessarily a routine. You could not have a laundry routine at all and just respond to the laundry whenever you can, but your laundry still goes through a cycle. Does that make sense? There are two different things. So name your cycles, not your routines. Start with that. Not yet anyway. We're going to get to the routines.

Likely your cycles are the ones I already mentioned. Laundry, food, cleaning. And that could also be broken up by rooms or areas of your home if you like. Maybe there's something about work or daily chores, you know, paper, school papers, bills, stuff like that. So name things in your home. Think of it this way. Name things in your home that always sneak up on you. You know, those are usually things that are in a cycle where it's like, man, I got to do this again. That's a cycle. Projects are not cycles. Projects have an end. And then they're done until the next project, right? So what in your home is in a cycle? All right. That's number one. Second. Name your routines. Do any of those cycles currently have routines attached to them?

If it helps, you can write those routines down. I found it really helpful to do that as like, you know, like as a circle with arrows, kind of like a flowchart, you know, where a circle is a week. Most of our cycles, I think, are usually right around a week. So our routines are likely going to be weekly routines, maybe. You know, that's fairly common. But however you want to visualize it, I think visualizing any routines that you currently have, along with the days that you do those things is really helpful to see. Okay. So that's number two. So number one, name your cycles. Number two, name your routines that go with those cycles. Number three, what's working? What in a specific routine is working? What day does a task land that feels like it's a really good day for you right now in the season of life? How do you see the overlap

of certain cycles and or certain routines working well together? You know, what's working? you could use a highlighter to mark those things in one color if you want to where you visualized all your routines. I love any excuse to use a highlighter, a mild liner in particular. I love those things. Okay, so that's three. What's working? Four, what's not working, obviously. What cycle doesn't have a routine? What cycle has a routine that no longer works for you? What routine is bumping up against another in an unhelpful way? You're basically looking at you. You're basically looking at that. for places and times where the cycle of your home and the routines within it are bunched together. That's usually where stress happens. So what's not working? What's missing? What's too close together?

What needs to be less rigid so you can adjust more easily? Where do you need help? What's not working? You could use a different color highlighter for this one if you want. And then fifth, what matters most right now? As you look at your home cycles and your routines at what's working and what's not, as you seek to adjust those things, what matters most right now? In the season that you are in, what is your priority? That way you know what directions to adjust, right? You're allowed to leave some things for later.

to be lazy about them or just leave them completely undone. So what matters most right now? And then finally, sixth, what can you do right now to start small? Can you move when you go grocery shopping? Like move it to a different day or time of day? Can you put your clean laundry in a different spot? Can you stop sorting socks? You know, there are so many ways that all of you listening could start small.

So what's yours? as you remember that your home is supposed to be in a cycle, that it's supposed to be at varying places, that it's not going to ever all be done at the same time and stay that way, that your home is alive, right? Because it's got you in it. It might have other people in it. By trying to create a certain kind of home, we get all roboty again. We take the soul out of it. your home has soul. It's supposed to be in a cycle at all times. And the more you notice that and adjust where you need to adjust in very small ways, kindly and intentionally based on what matters to you in your season, you will create not only a relaxing home routine, but a relaxing

home and a relaxed you. It doesn't mean that you're like never stressed or overwhelmed or frustrated, but your mentality towards that stress and overwhelm and frustration, it relaxes a lot more quickly than it used to. You see the cycle, you adjust the routine, and you live your life. And that's how to create a relaxing home routine. Now, next week's episode is kind of a practical arm of this one. And it will probably be called, because sometimes I change titles, it will probably be called something like seven ways to manage daily chaos.

because that happens, like daily chaos happens, no matter how great and relaxing your home routine is, which is part of the point, right? It's better to pivot than to plan. And if you're a person of any kind, often your plans do not work out. Like that's just part of being human. And that's true in your home. So next week, we will talk about the daily chaos and how to handle it in a helpful kind, maybe even efficient way. But for now, pay attention to the fact that your home is in a cycle. Your routines can line up with those cycles or not. And you can adjust in small ways to make it more relaxing within you. All right, before we go, let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. This week, it is Hannah Winslow. I love this idea, especially in light of talking about, you know,

kind of home rhythms. Hannah writes this. I loved a podcast episode a few weeks ago where the tip was to decide when you are going to have time for friends. I took this principle and I applied it to my children. We now have Friday evenings open for play dates. We can host pizza and play dates at our house any Friday that our kids would like to have a friend over. My kids are only four and six, but they love seeing their friends outside of school. So five to seven on a Friday works perfect for us. It was kind of my lazy night anyway, where the kids would just eat pizza and now they get to have a friend and eat pizza. One of our family values is relationships and I want to help my kids nurture those, but I was always struggling with the scheduling of it all. This has made it super

simple for us. Hannah, I love this so much. I love this. I love that you are creating a rhythm around something that matters. And I could even hear like the joy and the in the groundedness, even in your message. Things like this seems so simple, but they make such a huge impact in our lives. So I just love this. Thank you so much for sharing this idea, Hannah. And congratulations on being the lazy genius of the week. Okay, y'all, that is it for today. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra. I'll see you next week. If you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life, it's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life, because when you're

living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A-plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.