Have I declared a most important detail yet in these 31 Days of Details?
Well, I’m going to do it now. It’s the Daily Pick-Up.
I know that, but why oh why does it have to be my least favorite? It’s just so un-dramatic. Cleaning the bathrooms involves germ-warfare. Cleaning the kitchen involves soapy water and sending bits of food swirling down the drain.
Even floor-mopping gives you a bit of a workout and feels like a big accomplishment.
But picking up has no pizazz. No Wow Factor.
No va-va-va-voom.
Really, bend over and get that piece of paper that fell to the floor? Can’t it wait until I have time to do a good job cleaning? Go throw away that single out-of-date-note-from-school? Aren’t there more that I should look at before I get up?
When I don’t do daily pick-ups my house looks horrendous. When I do, my house looks okay.
Okay is better than horrendous.
And that was my detail for today. I also mopped the kitchen, and cleaned my George Foreman Grill
This is also my biggest battle. I think it’s for the same reason. No fun to it… Glad to know I’m not alone. Gonna go try to do some pick up now. Thanks for the motivation!
I have the older George Foreman Grill with out the removable plates. Not fun to clean at all. So instead, when I use it, I lay foil over the bottom then fold it over the top of the food. You do want to make sure the foiled is angled into the little tray under it. But when I get done, I get to throw the foil away and don’t have to clean the grill part. 🙂
Oh, it’s so true. And we comment all the time about how if we don’t pick up just ONE day, how horrendous it really does get! 🙂
“but it was the less-than-ten-minutes spent picking up that had the biggest impact.” So true – good reminder! Thanks!
Good for you. It has a marvellous cumulative effect however. Think of it as magic.
Yeah, I’ve got to get into a daily pick up routine. I guess that’s why my house always looks horrendous.
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You are so right. My least favorite as well, yet I agree it has the most impact. If I skip just one day, it takes way more than ten minutes or even 20 minutes to catch up. Which reminds me…it’s time to pick up.
I couldn’t agree more.
I LOVE the daily pick-up. In a weird way it is less glamorous (because cleaning the bathroom is sooooo wonderful!), but walking into a room that is pretty much clean is such a great feeling. My problem is the opposite, while I’ve gotten the daily pick-up down the heavy duty cleaning is where I struggle. I think I spend to much time getting it “really” clean and should just settle for “good enough”.
The lack of wow factor is a huge problem for me too. I think I’ve gotten into heroic cleaning. That is when you’ve let everything get so bad that it’s a huge accomplishment to get it clean, and everybody is forced to notice, and you can point and say “look at what I got done”
Keeping things clean has no drama. Plus once you get used to heroic cleaning you think, oh god I can’t clean it will take half and hour. My house is much better than it used to be, but I still don’t have any routines.
I’m reading backwards through your blog. It reads like a novel–I love it! But I really miss those daily checklist posts. They were really motivating!
Reading backwards and I had to comment on this. I just had my first child a year ago (OMG she’s a year old?!?) and I started reading your blog maybe two months ago. I love how you’re making things work for you. Even if it means figuring it out multiple times. I tried Flylady, and while she said make it work for you, it never worked for me because her emails said something different from what I was doing. So I’m following your path. Pick a new daily each week and try. (I also use an app called habitica to help with my dailies because if I don’t check them off, my character loses health!)
Anyway, the point to this was, I added a 5 minute pick up almost right away because I need to keep the floors clean for my crawling one-year-old. I also added dust and sweep, but I LOVE the pick up. I will routinely get off my butt to do it. Convincing myself to take three minutes to sweep the house on the other hand… that’s an all day task. The convincing. Not the task.
I’m so glad you love this task! It’s a game-changer for sure.
Ok, I know this is super old, but I has to comment because this is so me.
The worst one (that my husband lovingly makes fun of me for all the time) is sweeping a room or even the entire house and then leaving the pile(s) of sweepings in a corner somewhere to eventually get kicked and redistributed all around the house.
Apparently this is actually an ADHD thing? (I also think it’s a tired human thing). The big task has an obvious visual payoff that activates reward centers in your brain, but that little detail that completes the task or stops it from getting out of hand in the first place? Not so much.