What Can I Accomplish in Five Minutes?

August 8, 2010 By 7 Comments

I’ve been putting off working on my laundry room because:

It has a door that closes, and therefore falls waaaayyyyy farther down on the list than things that can easily be seen.

Compared to how it was before I got my laundry routine under control, it’s not that bad.  I mean, I can see the floor on an almost daily basis!

And the biggest reason for my procrastination . . . I have a bad case of the donwannas.  It’s summer, I’m in survival mode, and every decluttering project that breaks through my Super-Selective-Slob-Vision gets filed in the “I’ll do that after school starts” folder in my brain.

But when Lauren, my friend over at Mama’s Laundry Talk, shared her own need to re-organize her laundry room, and put out a call for her readers to share their own laundry room transformations, I decided I could maybe give it . . . five minutes.

So I took some before pictures, and set the timer.  (I was serious about the five minute thing.)

The picture up top is my full-view “before” picture.

Here’s what it looked like after exactly five minutes:

The focus isn’t good, but you can tell that five minutes didn’t make much of a dent.  Here’s a close up before and after of the top of the dryer, where I decided to concentrate my efforts after about one minute of floundering.
Before:
And after five minutes:
 So, I set the timer for another 5 minutes.  (See how just doing something inspires me to do more?)
A little more visible progress this time.  But in five more minutes, it looked like this:
Now, I was getting somewhere!  Soooo, I set the timer one last time, and after five minutes, it looked like this:
It may not be a laundry room makeover, but I’m super-excited and proud of it.
The five minute timer was a mental thing.  When I just don’t want to declutter, even I can’t pretend that I don’t have five minutes.
My main rule for this project was to use the “go ahead” principle.  Mentally, I needed to be able to quit after 5 minutes.  Often, when I declutter, I make piles of “donate”, “trash”, and “re-locate” items.  So, when I step back and look at my shiny new cleared area . . . I trip over the piles and then groan when I realize that the job is far from being actually done.
So, I decided to use the “go ahead” principle.  (I just named it that, by the way.)  When I throw away a ridiculous number of empty detergent bottles, and uncover a pile of change, I need to “go ahead” and take the change to our change dish in the master bedroom.  Don’t pile it up to wait until I’m “done decluttering.”  If I did that, I wouldn’t be able to quit after 5 minutes.  Or worse . . . if I did quit after 5 minutes, I’d almost have made the situation worse.
Make sense?  It goes along with my two decluttering questions, and is totally essential for the five minute job.

Filed Under: decluttering, laundry | 7 Comments

Blog Hop ’10

August 8, 2010 By 5 Comments

I’m participating in Blog Hop ’10, and the instructions are to keep things short and sweet and share a little about your blog.

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I started my blog on the first day of school, in August ’09, because:

I’m a slob.

I was sick and tired of being a slob, and of feeling helpless to change.

I had STUFF, way too much, and needed something to keep me focused on getting rid of it.

I knew how to clean, but was so random about it that I never had a clean house unless I knew the specific hour when the doorbell was supposed to ring.

I desperately wanted to start blogging, but could not justify letting one more thing take my focus away from my home.

Now, it’s August of 2010, just two weeks shy of my first blogiversary, and:

I’m still a slob.  I’ve learned over the past year that my brain is not like that of “normal” people, and I’ll always and forever have to make adjustments for my special-ness if I want to keep my home in order.

My house is almost always livable now.  I’ve had a hard time staying consistent in the glorious-routine-free-summer, but it’s so much better than it was pre-blog.

I have a lot less stuff, but a lot more stuff left to purge.

I know what needs to be done to have a clean house.  There are days when I still don’t do those things, but I finally get it.

What would you gain by joining me on my journey? 

Honesty.  Complete and total honesty.  One of my main purposes in this blog was to make myself stop making excuses. 

Reality.  Other cleaning blogs have fabulous lists and ideas and charts for you to follow.  I share my reality.  I do have lists and charts and ideas, but my main purpose in sharing them is to show how they really work, for a real-life slob.  Are they realistic?  Do they solve my unique slob-problems?  Are they sustainable? 

Hope.  By being consistent, staying focused, and sharing my journey from slobdom to a livable home, I have gained hope.  Change is possible.  It isn’t easy by any means, and it is far from instant . . . but it is definitely possible.

Go check out the other blogs participating in Blog Hop ’10 over at Pensieve.com!

Filed Under: blog stuff | 5 Comments

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