My mostest favoritest Slob Delusion in the whole wide world?
If I had more time/wasn’t so busy/didn’t have SO MANY other things to do, my house would be clean.
Magically.
Easily.
Without me even realizing I was cleaning it.
Is it the true definition of delusional when someone has learned from (oh-so-much) experience that something isn’t true, but still holds on to the belief in the depths of her Slob Heart?
Summer was fun. Summer wasn’t lazy (with swim team and musical theatre and football training and such), but there were days where I truly had time.
Chunks of mornings with nothing I HAD to do.
No pressures or expectations.
So I cleaned house.
But because I felt no time pressure, I found myself falling back into my old ways of Piddly Cleaning.
Piddly Cleaning = Wandering around, picking up or dusting or wiping down whatever came across my vision.
Piddly Cleaning doesn’t work, y’all.
Here’s how it goes for me: I start clearing the dining room table, but as I go to put something away, I notice there are enough dark clothes to make a load of laundry. (Who needs Laundry Day when you have TIME??) I gather up the load of laundry, only to open the washing machine and realize I left a load in there yesterday (or the day before yesterday or the day before the day before yesterday). Time to grab the vinegar and re-wash that load. So much for the new load of darks.
And so on and so forth. Lots of starting, little finishing.
At some point, it’s time to pick up one of the kids from one of his/her activities, but even though I’ve been “cleaning” for an hour and a half, I’d never convince a jury that I’d done a single thing.
Piddly cleaning, even for long periods of uninterrupted time, produces pretty much no visible results.
Blech.
I know this. I have a distinct memory of a conversation with Hubby when the kids were itty-bitty. I was wailing that I felt like I spent all-day-every-day cleaning, never sitting down to watch a show or read a book or catch a nap, and yet at the end of the day there was nothing to show for it.
The reason I remember this conversation so well? The look in Hubby’s eyes. A forced, supportive smile revealed as inauthentic by the confusion/disbelief/skepticism in his eyes.
The natural evidence that I’d cleaned house all day would be . . . a clean house. Right?
A decade or so later, I get it. I understand why (after six years of slob-blogging) Piddly Cleaning produces no traction.
Really.
But I still fall for this particularly loved delusion. As frustrating as re-learning this was, I guess it’s a good reminder.
The basics are the basics no matter how busy I am. Dusting the display of glassware in the back room won’t produce a “Wow, the house looks great!” if dishes are sitting in the sink.
Yes, it’s harder when life is crazy. But on its own, “life not being crazy” doesn’t automatically result in a clean house.
Routines result in a clean house.
Blergh.
--Nony
This was me yesterday! I felt like I cleaned all day. But other than the trash pile in front of the garage (10+ bags) you couldn’t even tell. The house didn’t look appreciably better! The laundry didn’t get done. The 10 minutes of vaccuming that would have finished one room didn’t get done. The pots on the stove didn’t get done. And I didn’t follow to rule to put things up. NOW. All I did was weed out the trash, and move the keepers from one pile on the floor to another pile on the floor and then ran out of steam and time before I put stuff up. Part of that unfortunately is because to actually put some of the stuff up I’d have to clean out/organize large parts of other things… like the bookshelves. Because heaven forbid I actually get rid of the pile of books that I am unlikely to finish in my entire lifetime…
But today – today will better. I will wash the dishes and put them away. I will vaccum a 3×6 piece of carpet, an armoire, an end table, and the blinds. And I will be *DONE* with that room before I move on. And I will start one piece/pile at a time. And put them up. Even it means balancing books precariously on the edges of the shelves just to get them out of the floor once and for all. And filing. And shredding. And vaccuming where I shredded. Again. Because that’s how cleaning actually WORKS.
I have found that having even one nicely clean room is an enormous help emotionally, so when I’m feeling stressed, I work on one room until it is tidy and attractive. Then, when I’m about reading to tear my hair out, I retreat to that room and take deep breaths. That means not drifting around the house doing one thing here, another thing there. Thanks for the wisdom!
I discovered your blog a few weeks ago and have been binge-reading it ever since, often laughing until I cried because what you describe sounds so much like my life (minus the kids). I, too, have a slob mind and slob vision. I’m the person who, as a teenager, famously (in our family) said in response to my mother’s question “Where is the TV Guide?”:
“It should be on the first layer. I only dropped it 10 minutes ago.”
And that’s pretty much what life has been like ever since. Mr JH and I do have a weekly cleaning lady, so our apartment never falls into dirtiness, but it has never been tidy. Thankfully, he’s tidier than I am, but he also likes to hang onto stuff, so the piles have been accumulating for years.
Lately, I’ve been making progress on reducing the piles of clutter. And your post about Piddly Cleaning comes at the perfect moment. I had been making some progress with Piddly Cleaning in terms of shrinking some of the piles of clutter in our apartment and my office. But I did feel like Sisyphus – slowly pushing a stone uphill only to have it roll back down to the bottom, over and over again, because the mess kept creeping back … And that’s because I was contributing to certain piles (the clothes I just wore pile, the dishes I just used pile) even as I was shrinking others (the unneeded chargers or cords pile).
There is a part of me that knows that I need to add some cleaning routines to my life if I was really going to make progress. But in the past I held back because I didn’t want to turn into one of those people (ahem, my mother) who seemed incapable of breaking their cleaning routines for a good reason. (I swear, if the house ever caught on fire but the beds were unmade, she’d make the beds before leaving the house. And my husband has a tendency to decide that the dishes must be washed/loaded into the dishwasher about 3 seconds before we need to leave the house to get to a concert on time.)
But I need not fear that I will turn into a routine-bound clean freak. That’s just never going to happen and I can’t let it be an excuse to avoid routines. So I’m taking my incremental approach and have been gradually adding “tidy it/clean it now” routines to my day and my week (e.g., putting away my work clothes when I get home, collecting all the scattered newspapers on Monday and putting them in the recycle bin), and I’m starting to see a difference.
This. Is. Perfect.
Due to my husband losing his job and going back to school, I was working for the last 1.5 years. Not even full-time, but enough to exhaust me full-time! So, nothing got done around the house. The kids (I’m talking teens here) barely kept the house livable. Things got piled in my room for me to get to “later” – a later that never came.
Finally, my husband graduated and got a really great job, and I was able to come back home and raise my kids. We were going to play catch-up on housework and homeschooling over the summer … but I was so exhausted that I just wanted to take a day off. Every day. For a month. Or two. I had plenty of time. I had plenty of projects to do. I even had a list of them.
How many got done? Like, done-done? Not started and left halfway through? Zero. Zero projects. (Unless, of course, it had a deadline.)
Having more time does not equal more work getting done. Especially if you don’t HAVE to.
Hence the saying: If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it!
Love your blog, Nony/Dana!
I can so relate!! “Piddly Cleaning” – unfortunately that’s my favorite kind of cleaning, and you’re right, it leads to less than stellar results!
It is so nice to know that I’m not the only “slob” out there.
Thanks for posting this. I am guilty of this. I was wondering what is your daily routine and how do you stick to it.
I can’t tell you how many times I have printed up a daily to do list but never actually checked anything off of it.
Thank you for not making me feel like a failure as a mom and a wife.
Athena, do you have my e-book, 28 Days to HOpe for Your Home? It’s all about creating an ultra-basic daily routine that doesn’t require a paper checklist because it’s that simple. https://www.aslobcomesclean.com/28-days-to-hope-for-your-home/
It strikes me how so much of what you write about house cleaning also applies to weight loss.
My favorite delusion is “If I had more time, I would excercise.”
I have been following you for a while, but missed the term “piddly cleaning”. This is so me – ALL THE TIME! I walk around and pick a few things up – but not enough to vacuum, do a few dishes – but not the whole sinkful, start cleaning off the desk – but only a few papers, not enough to actually start working there. I blame it on ADD, but I think “piddly cleaning” is a more accurate term. The worst part is that then I am SO FRUSTRATED that I have been “cleaning all day” but nothing looks any better. So then I am mad at the family for their part of the mess, mad at myself for being a poor homemaker and generally grumpy with the world. So what to do but throw in the towel and lay down and read a book or get out out of the house and go do something fun! Which just makes it all worse later! So, focus on a single area you say? Use a checklist you say? I trust you, so I will give it a try!
Ok, I do this a lot. I also do a lot of re-cleaning though. I have 3 kids and 4 dogs. I made my bed 3 times the other day. First time, made it. Went to do a quick pick-up in my bathroom, kids jumped on the bed and apparently JUMPED on the bed, cause it was ransacked 2 minutes later when I came out. Holler at kids to stay off my bed. Make it again. Remember to grab dirty laundry that I was taking out of the bathroom. Take to laundry room. Head back to my room, get distracted 1/2 way down the hall by kids. Go back to living room to deal with kids. Go back to my room to turn off all lights and close all doors make sure it is all picked up. Find out the dogs had been following me around like the crazy animals they were. All the walking back and forth I was doing, well they were sprinting down the hallway-from my room to the living room, and back again. I didn’t know right then that they were using my bed as the turn around spot. I make my bed again-after shooing dogs out cause now they wanted to play on my bed. This time being sure to tuck all corners in on the bed-that way if used for a spring board again, they wouldn’t bunch up in the middle of the bed. Hubby asked ‘what did you do today?’ He knows how it rolls around here though. When I said ‘made the bed’, he asked how many times!
My issues aren’t really delusional. My issues are excuses. 😀
The more energy I have, the cleaner my house is (I hate hypothyroidism, lol). Summer doesn’t help that and it means a lot of stuff goes undone. With baseboard heating, I can’t have central air, and not all rooms have a window a/c because of either the windows aren’t suitable for them, or because of the outlet placement and my nervousness at hooking them up to an extension cords.
I’m actually very excited that the temps are dropping to the mid-high 60s/low 70s in a couple of days. That means I can catch up on some things I’ve let go for the past three months. Not only do I have more energy in cooler weather, the house doesn’t feel like an oven where there’s no a/c.
But like you, I’ll avoid piddly cleaning. Instead, I’ll focus on one room at a time. And that will include washing windows and curtains and getting rid of the spiderwebs I’ve left up to help control the bug population. If it’s not mosquitoes, it’s flies – the one drawback to living in the country and across the road from a field of cattle. 😀
Gosh – this really spoke to me! I have totally fallen off the wagon cleaning wise this year and I have been attempting to get our house back into shape. I’ve found myself getting a whole load of tasks 75% done. Get it together, Lauren. No more piddling around for me!
I love this post. It has made me more aware of how I clean. When I am conscious of it, I can actually get something done. Then I came across this today and think it’s absolutely hilarious and totally fits this post. Enjoy the read! http://www.newslinq.com/attention-deficit-disorder/
Piddly Cleaning? Oh yeah, I’m extremely experienced in that 🙁
Thanks for making me realize that :*
Piddly Cleaning, I am glad you put a name to it. Soooo many of us need to hear your profound words. Thankfully I found you and the Flylady at the same time. I now understand that you can’t clean clutter from her, but learned from you HOW to remove the clutter!
I think i used to Piddly-Clean (love that word teehee) and now I clean the flylady way… as fast as I can. Her idea of a 15 min timer is life changing. You get dishes done, laundry moved forward, bathrooms cleaned and so on… fast and that makes a world of difference to us piddlers. We get breaks even HA.
Loved your idea of cleaning visible spots first, and then doing the other routines or needs afterwards. You ladies have changed lives, so keep up the good work.
And oh, thanks for keeping the videos coming. Even though we’ve read your words, it is nice to hear YOU say them… Funny you speak like I expected. Your humor comes through perfectly in your book, blog posts.
I so wish I’d read this yesterday. I feel like I’ve wasted a day today because of this exact thing – piddly cleaning.
With nothing to do except wait for a delivery I had visions of a clean, tidy house by the time I had to pick my daughter up for school. I’d decided to wash my car, but that wouldn’t be take long, and then I’d work on the house and it would be amazing.
Hmm.
I do have a washed car. I did clear my dressing table. I have a new load of washing in the tumble dryer and one in the washing machine, I cleaned out our children’s pet guinea pigs, but I feel unproductive and it’s because the house still looks like a mess. I should have read this post this morning and I’d have had a much better day.
By the way, I live in England and I’m working my way through your blog posts, your you tube videos and your podcasts! Can’t wait to catch up on them all! Claire