Have you ever felt exhausted after spending a whole day quote-on-unquote “cleaning” only to realize nothing seems to be different? The problem might be that you’re dealing with your clutter and fighting against your daily tidying habits.
When reading, cleaning, and organizing blogs, it’s easy to think that their houses are always perfect, but that’s probably not the case for most. The reality is that our homes are lived in, but that doesn’t have to mean we can’t keep them clean-ish.
Look at your daily tidying habits
Tidying is about putting things in their place. For example, after you brush your teeth, you should put your toothbrush back, not set it down on the counter.
We all lead busy lives, but you can help yourself by tidying up daily. This can mean building time for the tidying of the house or just becoming more self-conscious about your actions.
There are many ways to tidy your home. You could tidy right after or set what I like to call a reset time daily. This worked best when the kids were home with me all day before they started school and when they were home with me all summer long.
It could also create a tidy bin when you don’t have time to put everything away, but you gather it all in a bin/tote to put away later. Just a quick tidy-up can genuinely transform your efforts in the long term.
In the evening, for example, after we have had dinner and hung out, played, and connected as a family, I have a Google task that will sound, which is set fifteen minutes before bedtime, that tells us to clean up. This means the whole family resets areas of the home we were in. It’s so much nicer than waking up to a mess in the morning from last night’s chaos.
Banish the clutter
Clutter is simply the things in your home that no longer serve you and your family but still take up space and require maintenance. Maybe you should store them or move them out of the way occasionally.
Either way, it takes time away from you, space in your home, or even money from your account if you pay for storage. None of those are things anyone wants.
Too much clutter can cause stress and can become overwhelming.
Clutter affects everyone!
Getting rid of clutter regularly is vital. I built a decluttering routine that I found manageable because focused energy is essential. I follow a calendar if you will. You can see the entire plan here. But the jist of it is that I get rid of things regularly: daily, weekly, and monthly.
Daily – getting rid of paperwork or junk mail
Weekly– removing outgrown or worn-out clothes during laundry
Monthly-focused decluttering tasks include decluttering toys, cleaning out the pantry, cleaning the garage, etc.
Why Organization Matters for Cleanliness
Being organized looks different for each person, but it helps with having a clean home. When things have a place inside your home, they can be returned to it during your tidying sessions or resets.
And they create time for you to get to your home’s cleaning aspect.
If you are wondering where to start, read this post.
What does it mean to truly clean
Cleaning is removing dust, dirt, and grime from surfaces. It’s scrubbing things down with soap and water. It’s building a routine around your life and schedule and understanding that a clean home is consistent versus letting things pile up.
It’s shooting for the goal of living in maintenance mode versus living in dreadful mode: I need to clean, and it gets so bad that it takes more time. It’s the secret that every person asks how your home is so clean.
When you commit to the daily clean routine, it takes less time, and things run much smoother. If you have ever heard of people saying they can clean their house in a short amount of time, this is why. They are digging up layers of grime. They are suffering their way through it all. I am not a mop-swiffer fan, though.
So now that we understand the difference, if you spend most of your time dealing with clutter and daily messes of things out of place, you feel drained, of course. You are emotionally exhausted from deciding what to do with your clutter and physically run around the house in all directions with no sense of focus.
Think of it this way: When you walk into a waiting room, there is nothing on the floor or on the tables. Yet when you go to reach for a magazine, it’s full of dust. And when you sit on a chair, it’s sticky or grimy. That is the difference between cleaning and tidying, and in order to deal with the issue of your home not feeling clean, you have to deal with your daily habits and clutter first.