The Lazy Genius Podcast - #89 - Reset the House Instead of Burning It Down

Episode Date: December 31, 2018

Tomorrow marks the beginning of 2019, can you believe that?! In today’s episode, I talk about why it’s okay if you don’t have all of your goals and intentions for the year crystal clear by the time the ball drops tonight. And I offer three tips for resetting your home after the holidays in a (mostly) painless way. Stuff Mentioned:  Listen to last January’s The Lazy Genius Sets Goals or read How to Set Goals Like a Normal Person if you feel like you need some concrete goal-setting encouragement. For you list makers out there, check out Emily P. Freeman’s “Make the Most Important List” on The Next Right Thing podcast. The Nester recommends taking out everything from a room other than main furniture every now and then to let the space speak its mind and tell you what it wants to be. You can read more about decorating in the right order in her book The Cozy Minimalist Home. Check out my ebook The Swap if you’re hoping to declutter and find a path through your stuff this year. 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. Happy New Year's Eve and thank you for tuning into the lazy genius podcast. I'm Kendra 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 89. Reset the house instead of burning it down. You've got champagne to pour and kids to trick into thinking it's midnight when it is actually 8 o'clock. So we will keep this quick. And I am recording this within 24 hours of you hearing it and I can promise you that we are tricking our kids with fake midnight without question. Okay, so before we talk about house stuff, I just want to give you a quick tap on the shoulder and remind you that you do not have to solve all of life's problems by tomorrow, by January 1st, or even identify what all of life's problems are. Remember that the start of the new year, it is such a fun time. It is a gift and it feels fresh and all that good

stuff. But keep it fun and fresh and good. Because we come. color it with guilt and shoulds and self-improvement and all the things that kind of make a sad. And I don't want that for any of us. So just keep your hustle and check. It is okay to be motivated to set goals and clean up the Christmas decorations and bust through all the things. But it is also okay to just let the first day of the year come and go without any fanfare beyond like smiling at the new year. Chances are you are you're not always. You're not working today or tomorrow and you might get a chance to just like hang with your people. So remember that it's okay to just do that.

Just be a person. And if you're feeling itchy about goals or wanting a new way to see fresh starts, next week's episode is super for you. Last January, I shared an episode called The Lazy Genius Sets Goals. And there is also a post I wrote about how to set goals like a normal person. If you need some like concrete goal talk on the literal first day of the year, you can check out both of those resources in the show notes. And the next week, we're going to dive into how to make changes as a person without getting

caught up in the vortex of checkboxes and failure. I am really, really excited about that episode. So I hope you tune in next week. And if you are wanting some kind of reflection to start off the year, rather than thinking about what you can and should do in 2019. Think about what you loved and maybe didn't love about 2018. Emily P. Freeman has a great episode about that on the next rating podcast called Make the Most Important List. She encourages a practice of noticing what activities and choices have been life-giving and those that were life-draining. It really is such a beautiful practice this time of

year and it helps inform your decisions for next year slash tomorrow, which is super weird. So check the show notes if you want to listen to that episode too. Okay. So what is all of this like scurrying and resting and looking forward and backwards mean on the homefront, like in our literal homes? After the holidays are over and we start taking down all the decorations, it's crazy how often we are struck with the desire for all new things, either because we hate our old things, or because it is just too much work to figure out where all the old things should go.

Starting from scratch, which we all kind of think that, is a pike dream, right? But unless you get on, if you get on one of those, like, surprise home decorating shows where they, like, chat you up on a Home Depot, and then they give you a new room in a day, starting from scratch just isn't in the cards for us. So today, let's go through three simple steps to resetting your house after the holidays instead of burning. it down. So step one, slow down your mind. Slow down your mind. We can feel a little tornado-ish with our stuff like throwing everything in boxes and yelling at kids to play in a different room because mommy needs to get this place to get them. Now while I understand the speed with which you want to attack peace and calm in your home, it's also maybe a nice idea to slow down a little,

like mostly in your mind. When our thoughts start spinning, they can catch everything. It's like our brains are a cyclone and every thought gets swept up in the madness and then our bodies get swept up at the madness and we move too quickly inside and out. It starts out with like you're thinking, man, this place is a mess and then your thoughts start going about how your stuff is crap or maybe your stuff was great but now it is crap because your kids have ruined it. And then you get like winded when you're carrying a box of your crap to the garage and you start thinking about how you really need to get in better shape. So as you take down all the ornaments and stuff,

you're like mentally Googling workout plans and how to put together smoothie bags for your freezer or something. And then you walk back in the house after stacking the boxes in the garage and somehow your kids have emptied out every basket and bucket of toys in the living room looking for like one single hot wheel car and now the place looks like a giant junk drawer

and you begin to erupt like the emotional volcano that you are. you're spinning mind just that quick, like that quick thought of, man, this place is a mess. And you let it spin and you let it spin. Then everything gets caught up in it and you like have to apologize to your kids for losing your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your issue in front of them. It is understandable. But, you know, still, we don't necessarily want that all the time. Okay. So the speed of our minds, it can cause problems.

So as you enter into resetting your house, slow down. your mind. One, it'll help slow down your desperate body. And then more than that, though, slowing down, it helps us see better. It helps us feel more grateful, more generous in how we see what we own, and more okay when the whirlwind reset gets sidetracked by kids or dinner or just being plain tired. So I know it may feel a little knowing that this is step one, but slow down your mind. Breathe, play pretty music, pay attention to when your thoughts start to spin. And most likely you'll notice because your body will follow. Your steps will get harder like you're walking around the house, like clomping around. You're packing ornaments like very aggressively.

Just pay attention to the speed of your mind and what it does to your body and what thoughts are spinning around. Just pay attention and slow down. So that's step one. Okay. Now step two, practical here is to remove everything that's Christmas, not winter, necessarily, but remove everything that's Christmas related and put it away. Your first task isn't to reset your side tables and bookshelves and get the house back in order. It's just to put away the Christmas stuff. Now, you can do this whenever you want. If you follow the Advent calendar, the 12 days of Christmas start on Christmas day. So you might be going well into this first week of January before you start winding down actual Christmas. Whenever it happens, though, make the priority putting away the holiday stuff.

You can leave out the winter stuff, you know, like, you know the difference like Santa's or Christmas, stars and evergreen or winter. And then you can like clear those decks and you can clear them super slowly if it helps you. So this whole thing might take an hour or two in an afternoon or or depending on how elaborately you decorate for the holidays, it might spread out over a couple of days as life kind of happens around you. But just remember that it's easier to clear out everything you know you no longer need before you do anything with what is staying. Okay? And this is a bonus tip that I got from the Nestor. I'm on her email list and she sat on an email a couple days ago.

And her singular holiday tip, which is so good, is when you are putting away your holiday stuff, when you're putting away your Christmas stuff or whatever, look at the, when you pull out your bins and you look at what is inside those bins that you did not use, maybe you should just get rid of that stuff that you didn't use because you didn't use it for a reason. Maybe not, but maybe so. And then you're not like continuing to pack up things that you don't really care about. And they take up valuable storage and all the things. So I just, I love that tip. Thought I pass it along. All right. So step one is to slow your mind. Step two is to remove everything that's Christmas and put it away. do anything else. Just take away what you're not going to use anymore. And then step three is to clear off

your main surfaces and rebuild them one by one. So let me explain. Your furniture is probably in the same general place once the Christmas tree's gone, right? So the overwhelm of like when you want to actually burn your house down, it comes from decorating, like redecorating your tables and your shelves and then finding homes for all of the new gifts that you got. Or maybe your January eyes are starting to see how much you have and don't need. If that's the case, I do have a short e-book called The Swap, which is the lazy genius guide to decluttering for life. And that is available all January to help you with your decluttering needs if you need it. I'll put a link in the show notes. And you can check it out. But either way, you're wanting a pretty home

which includes decorated spaces and stuff that's put away, right? You want everything to have its own home. Now, the key, though, so you don't get overwhelmed by that, is to rebuild your spaces one by one, one coffee table at a time, one kid's bookcase at a time. Because if you say to yourself, I've got to get this house in order today. And then, spoiler alert, you won't even come close to that.

You're going to get supremely frustrated. Ask me how I know this. This is why a slow mind is step one, because it helps slow down your body when necessary. So think about it kind of like tiny goals. Like each surface or shelf is a tiny goal. You do them one at a time. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen Tiguan. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore.

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huge help to actually clear off all of your surfaces and live with them that way until it's their turn to be decorated. The Nestor calls this quieting your space. She actually, she talks about this on her new book, Cozy Minimalist Home. She recommends taking out everything from a room other than the main furniture, like every now and then, like every season even, to let the space speak its mind and tell you what it wants to be. She wrote, like I said, an entire book about this. It's decorating in the right order, basically, which is so genius to me. So it is called cozy minimalist home, and it's amazing, and I will link to it in the show notes. But clearing off just your tables and surfaces of all the decorative things, it can help you when it's time to.

reset. And then you make one surface pretty at a time. So if you think about your living room, you can like blank everything. Like take out the Christmas stuff, put it away, take it down, put it away. And then clear off all the other shelves and then you rebuild them one by one when you have the time. And the nice thing about leaving it blank for a while is that you can live with it and see what it needs. See what the space needs. Like if there's a desk that's blank and, you know, empty a surface and you like constantly are going over there looking for a pen, you know you might need a little jar of pens on that desk. Your life and your stuff, it will kind of tell you what it wants if you give it a chance to speak. Okay, so clear off your main surfaces and

rebuild them one by one. This way, when, not if, but when you get distracted or stopped by kids or schedules or whatever you get stopped by, you're not going to be leaving an entire unfinished house. You have one small project at a time, one small spot that you're working on, and it'll be easy to finish in a normal amount of time. So do the dresser in your living room, and then move to the table in your living room, and then the bookshelf in your living room. Go room by room and surface by surface one step at a time, not an entire house reset at a time. And again, a slow mind will help with this. Slow your expectations. You don't have to lower them. You don't have to give up on what matters to you. Set your expectations, but slow their timeline. And the slower you go, the more likely you'll

you'll like what you end up with. When you just chuck stuff back on tables and shelves to like get it over and done with, you're probably going to be unhappy with how it looks and functions and you're going to have to start over again anyway. So go slow. Clear off what you don't need. so you can easily see what's left to use and then rebuild those cleared surfaces one at a time. Now, this might all happen in a day. Depending on your life and your stuff and your house, it could be a really short process, but you can still apply a slow mindset to a short process. Okay.

So slow your mind. That's step one. Step two is to remove everything that's Christmas. And then step three is to clear off all. those surfaces and then rebuild them one by one. All right, tomorrow starts a new year. You do not have to solve everything by tomorrow. You do not have to have a perfectly appointed house and new pretty planner, all clear goals and a ton of plans about how this year is going to go. Those things are good and they will probably come. But they don't all have to come tomorrow. They just don't.

Patience is a really good thing. You're not falling behind because you get to set the page. You can't fall behind on your own pace. Next week, when we talk about goals, I will have something for you, some questions that you can ask yourself to look back and look forward in a thoughtful way. I'm really, really excited about that. So it'll be so fun to get together again then. And remember that this week, January, would that be the third, there is no Instagram live this week. We're all kind of still getting back into the hang of going back to work and school and everything. So we're going to take a bright from Instagram live this week.

But I will be back live next week. And that would be the 10th, right? So be sure to follow me on Instagram at The Lazy Genius. And if you're interested in getting some direction on decluttering to start the new year, if you're looking for a clear path through your stuff, my ebook, The Swap, is available all month for purchase. I'll put a link in the show notes. And you can check it out to see if it is a good fit for you.

All right. It has been on this last day of the year. You guys, it has been like truly such a gift spending 2018 with you. And I can't wait for what's going to happen in 2019. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, truly, for supporting the lazy genius podcast this year. It really just means the world. And I'm so, so, so grateful for you. Happy New Year friends. And I will see you next week. Bye. 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 podcast.

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