Monday, April 16, 2007

Adrea's Guide to Picking Up

or... Adrea's Guide to Reclaiming Control Over the Housework When You've Neglected It:
*warning, may not be acceptable to perfectionists (I see you out there)

Do a laundry burst. This helps keep the cycle going and lessens the chance of leaving a load of clothes in the washer to get moldy or the dryer to get wrinkled.

Do things that will make the greatest impact first. Don't organize the cupboard when you have last weekend's travel bag on the dining room table.

Never leave a room empty handed - pick up something on your way through it and either throw it away or put it where it belongs. Throw away most things (but first check if they contain money).

Put some music on.

Don't blog.

5 comments:

Juliana Shain said...

Can you please come do that at my house?

Ada said...

Sorry - too busy blogging...

Lori said...

I've been working on some of that myself. There are currently 3 loads of folded laundry on our bed, 2 more loads of dried laundry waiting to be folded, 1 in the dryer drying and 1 in the washer washing. We got just a tad behind.

And I also do the "what's going to have the greatest impact?" task prioritization. Of course, that means I end up letting all the plastic placemats and bibs get dirty at the same time because I'm focusing on other things, but I'm trying to get in the habit of just wiping them off right after a meal, when they're much easier to clean, rather than letting the food get good and stuck on them.

And for some reason, I have the hardest time getting motivated to clean the bathrooms, even though I love having clean bathrooms once they're done and I don't really mind the cleaning all that much once I'm actually doing it.

Ada said...

You know why I'm unmotivated about the bathroom? It does make a big impact but it's one of the rooms that loses that 'I just cleaned' shine the fastest.

I got stuck on laundry again. I finished the huge backlog only to be confronted with a new backlog from taking care of the backlog.

Lori said...

Yeah, I think that's my issue with bathroom cleaning, too. I *hate* that the bathroom only looks that way for maybe an hour or so, then it gets used again and the sink gets water drops and the mirror gets splashed.

Oh, well. Guess it's one of those things we just have to live with.