Dana K. White

A SLOB COMES CLEAN

Reality-Based Cleaning, Decluttering, & Organizing

What Can I Accomplish in Five Minutes?

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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.

Blog Hop ’10

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

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A Few More Bloggers

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Here are a few more bloggers whom I met at the Savvy Blogging Summit: Catherine at Frugal Homemaker Plus is not a slob, but is a kindred spirit. Kay Lynn blogs at Bucksome Boomer’s Journey to Retirement.  Get it?  Bucksome?  Say it out loud.  Now do you get it?  LOVE that. Coupons, Deals, and More is […]

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Inspiring Myself

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One of my biggest slob-problems is my love of Inspiration Based Cleaning. I want to wait until I feel inspired, but since that rarely happens, the house gets more and more cluttered, and inspiration becomes more and more difficult to find. Yesterday, I shared Monday’s shoe-pile project.  It was Non-Inspiration Based Cleaning, just a total “duh” , that I […]

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Changing the Scenery

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I’ve been looking at this pile of shoes . . . pretty much all summer. Every time I see it, it irritates me. Every time I see it and my brain acknowleges that I see it, it REALLY irritates me. I’ve tripped over it. I’ve sorted through it to find the shoes I needed. I’ve […]

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