My house is a complete mess! How many times have you said those words?
Do you want to know how to start cleaning when you are overwhelmed by the clutter?
Cleaning up your entire house might sound like a daunting task and could possibly take months! But you can do this and you don’t have to Marie Kondo it!
That’s right!
On The More Than Capable Mompreneur Podcast I had a chat with Dana White, a Decluttering Expert and the host of the podcast A Slob Comes Clean.
Dana is a mom of three, an author, podcaster, speaker, and (much to her own surprise) a Decluttering Expert. She shared some realistic home management strategies with me during our chat and a message of hope for the hopelessly messy.
Here’s a little bit of background information on Dana. In 2008 she discovered blogs and realized that was what she wanted to do. But she didn’t start her blog until August 2009 because her house was a disaster and she wanted to get it under control before taking on anything else.
“I was overwhelmed by the state of my home but I was also overwhelmed by all of my failed attempts at getting my house under control.”
So when she started her blog A Slob Comes Clean, she didn’t tell anyone what she was doing. Dana thought the blog would help her focus and get her house under control. Then her house would be perfect and she would write about the things that she actually felt qualified to write about.
Now it’s 2020 and she’s still writing about the same thing but obviously in a different way! Dana discovered this was the thing that she was supposed to be writing about all along. Her blog was the thing that people needed and now she’s developed a community because of it.
So exactly how can you start cleaning when you are overwhelmed?
Create Maintenance Habits
You don’t have to clean your house from top to bottom before maintenance type habits would actually make any impact. Maintenance habits will help you clean your house without feeling overwhelmed.
Start doing the dishes daily
Dana realized dishes was the thing that helped her start getting her house under control! She created this thing called dishes math. She didn’t know how long it took to do one day’s worth of dishes because she never did one day’s worth.
Don’t wait until it’s worth your time which means you’re doing 2-3 days worth of dishes at one time out of desperation because there are no clean ones.
Dana realized doing the dishes daily takes 15 minutes. But two days worth is not 15 or 30 minutes. It’s actually an hour! It multiples because now you having to rearrange things and shift things. Then three days becomes a huge project!
How do you benefit?
Doing the dishes every takes only takes about 15 minutes. The when it’s time to cook a meal (which we’ve all been doing way more in the past year than we ever have before) it doesn’t take anywhere near the effort that it used to because you don’t have to clear off spaces in your kitchen.
There is also a real mental thing that happens. When you take 15 minutes a day to keep your kitchen under control, it frees up time for you to do other things. You’ve got all of these other little tasks or even things that you would enjoy doing, that you want to spend time doing. When the kitchen is out of control, Dana would think she couldn’t do this fun thing or even this other thing because she really need to go get her kitchen cleaned up.
Dana has now implemented a pre-made decision. She doesn’t let herself evaluate whether or not she needs to do the dishes. It makes a huge difference if you just do them every single night!
The Decluttering Process
How to start cleaning when you’re overwhelmed? Here are three easy ways to get things back under control once they get a bit crazy.
Grab a black trash bag!
This one is a no brainer! There is something you can just throw away. It makes it visually less overwhelming and you’re more able to keep going.
And they have to be black because you don’t want the people in your house to see what you’re putting inside of them. If they see it, all of a sudden they’re going to be thinking, oh I forgot about that and now I have to have to keep it. You don’t want that to happen!
So grab the black trash bag or whatever you have! Grab the recycling bin if that’s what you have easily accessible in your house and just start getting rid of the trash.
Put away the easy stuff!
Easy stuff is anything that already has an established home in your house but for whatever reason it isn’t there. So, put things away. As you do this, the space becomes less visually overwhelming.
If there’s a pile, it’s a little bit smaller than it was before. And every time that that pile shrinks, you’ll be a little less overwhelmed and can keep going and keep making progress.
Implement five minute pick-ups!
Five minutes does not sound like it could make that big of an impact but it’s the very best habit to bring your kids in on. In the beginning it’s not fun at all! They’re going to pretend they don’t know where things go; someone is going to have to poop. And you know which one it is too!
The five minute pickup helps Dana get her house back to the way it’s supposed to be. She has a family of five picking stuff up for five minutes. That’s 25 minutes of work that’s happening! Five minutes is actually one of those mom cracks of time.
Knowing what to do in those moments where you go, I have a minute, what should I do? Do one of these things; do a five minute pickup or do the dishes!
If you’re a busy and distractible person, Dana’s five step process is just what you need!
The point is that if you follow the steps in order, you’re going to make progress and only progress – never ending up with a bigger mess. A lot of decluttering advice is to pull everything out of a space and then put back what you want to have in there.
Most of us pull everything out of a space, then life happens or you simply get overwhelmed looking at it all. So you walk away and all of a sudden your house is worse off because what used to be behind a cabinet door or in a drawer is now out on a counter and that makes you not want to declutter the next time. Right?!
So Dana’s steps are a different approach. Take care of things one item by one item which can feel like it’s less efficient except that whenever you have to stop in the process whether it’s been after five minutes or five hours or five days or whatever, you have made progress.
It’s better than it was before! And that is the best way to use the mom cracks of time!
Stop looking at the messy spaces in your house and saying I don’t have time to deal with this right now. Remember, you’re only going to make progress! Start throwing away trash and then that space is better in whatever that crack of time was.
Click here to grab a copy of Dana’s five step decluttering process.
To hear all of my chat with Dana, tune in to episode 35 of the podcast. Click below and tune in on your favorite platform.
Links mentioned in this episode:
Check out Dana’s website and the podcast
Grab a copy of Dana’s Five Step Decluttering Process
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