A Slob Comes Clean

What Can I Accomplish in Five Minutes?

By 10 Comments

control-your-clutter-with-my-books
What Can I Accomplish in Five Minutes at ASlobComesClean.com

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.

Dana White

A Slob Comes Clean is the completely honest (and never-ending) story of my deslobification process. As I find ways to keep my home under control, I share the truth about cleaning and organization methods that actually work for a real-life slob. And I'm funny.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. 1
    Mom of the Hillians says:
    August 9, 2010 at 3:40 am

    I need to declutter my laundry room. I have a couple cheap white shelves in there that I am need to straighten up so I can have the space to put up the necessities I purchased this week. I have started really watching the sales and getting the most out of my coupons. Jump on over to my blog to see what I was able to stock up on. Keep in mind that I have 7 kids and it takes a huge amount of necessities.
    http://www.awholebunchofhills.blogspot.com
    Now to get the laundry room organized to hold the cleaners. Did I mention that we homeschool and are trying to get things ready to start our new school year on the 16th?! Boy, do I have my work cut out for me this week!!! Oh, AND we are adding a puppy this week. Looks like I'm gonna need a lot of "just 5 minutes" this week. :o)

    Reply
  2. 2
    Nony the Slob says:
    August 9, 2010 at 6:26 pm

    Wow! A puppy! My kids would be so jealous!

    Reply
  3. 3
    Becky says:
    August 9, 2010 at 6:41 pm

    What's up with those white baskets? Are those regular laundry baskets hooked to a wall somehow?? I really like whatever that is…much better than multiple hampers for sorting!!

    Reply
  4. 4
    Nony the Slob says:
    August 9, 2010 at 7:44 pm

    Hi Becky, those are by Rubbermaid, and I got them at the Container store. They have handles that turn in, and then on the bottom of the baskets have an indention where the other basket's handle goes, so the baskets can sit on top of each other. Confusing enough?

    I didn't show them up close since I didn't actually work on them . . .

    Reply
  5. 5
    Mama Laundry says:
    August 10, 2010 at 1:12 am

    Oh you KNOW I am impressed! Good for you!

    Well, I've had a little pregnancy set back this weekend so I wasn't able to work on my laundry room at all.

    I'm living vicariously through all of you! Thanks so much for the link – I'm finally getting up a post for tomorrow am and I'll include it if you don't mind!

    -Lauren

    Reply
  6. 6
    Mom of the Hillians says:
    August 10, 2010 at 4:32 am

    Got the "puppy" today. He is a 10 month old black lab. He is big enough that my little ones can ride him like a horse. Oh my goodness, not sure I will be able to handle having him in the house long. He is house-trained, so I haven't had to worry about accidents. BUT, I will have to worry about him chewing everything. Guess that means I will be forced to have things picked up off the floor?! :o)

    Reply
  7. 7
    The Mom Venture Blog says:
    August 10, 2010 at 6:02 pm

    I totally relate to you! I set my timer for 15 min. and make it a game of how much I can get done in that time. I also like to just "go ahead" and put things away, even if it's in another room, as I go because, like you, it would otherwise just pile up and make things worse. My husband likes to do that because he wants the room clean NOW(doesn't matter I guess if another room gets messy in the process) and I HATE it! When he cleaned out our bedroom last year while I was pregnant, he threw everything in a pile out into the livingroom and guess who had to clean it up! Yours Truly! Grrrr…. Anyway, it's much better just to put things away as you go. LOL

    Reply
  8. 8
    JJ says:
    January 21, 2017 at 9:38 pm

    You throw out your plastic detergent bottles? Don’t, please! They’re all very recyclable. Take off the lids squash the bottles as flat as they’ll go, bag them up & take them in the recycling center. You’ll be saving them from the landfill, and saving Mother Earth from more pollution. Yes, I called the earth “Mother Earth”. God formed Adam from the dust of the earth; we are all descended from Adam, so that makes the earth our mother too.

    Reply
  9. 9
    Cheryl says:
    August 19, 2019 at 2:22 am

    I’m reading your blog from the beginning as you suggest. Since I know where this story is heading, it’s so exciting to see how “put it away, right now” began! I’m giggling with glee!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *