It's a minimalist Monday edition of Optimal Living Daily episode 2811, jumpstart your decluttering by Rachel Jones of NourishingMinimalism.com and I'm Justin Molick and I'm going to keep this intro nice and minimal for minimalist Monday, so let's get right to it and start optimizing your life. Jumpstart your decluttering by Rachel Jones of NourishingMinimalism.com. So you want a clutter-free home, a joyful space? I've been there, I've sat on my couch completely unhappy with what's surrounding me, piles on every surface, mountains of laundry, toys strewn across the floor, and dirty dishes in the sink.
Most of the items I didn't know what to do with, but I found the secret. It's not very exciting, it's not a magic pill, and sometimes I still have to talk myself into it, but this is the answer. Habits. When you change your daily habits to reflect your clean house desires, life will be easier.
Decluttering will start to happen. The house will start to become clean. It's not going to happen overnight, yes, some parts will be clean right away and stay clean for the most part, but decluttering the house is a process, changing the way you think about what you bring into the home, what you leave in the home, and your shopping patterns all take time to change, but they will if you stick with this one thing. Your daily habits are the foundation for a clean and clear home.
Without them, your home will only be clean on the cleaning days, you know, the days when company is coming over, or after the weekend you schedule the children to be away at grandma's, so you could clean. Changing your daily habits means that it can look like that regularly. Those cleaning sprees acted like a reset button for the home, but when implementing daily habits and routines is giving your home a reset twice a day. It's not likely to stay perfectly immaculate in the in-between times.
You do need to live in your home, and living means that things are out while they're being used. Living is what your home is for, so we're not going to strive to have it immaculate 24-7. You're striving for a reset twice a day. So why would this work?
Well, in a nutshell, because you stopped procrastinating. All of us who struggle with clutter struggle with procrastination to some degree. When we have daily things that need to be done, like the dishes, it's easy to find more important things to do instead of the dishes. We're very creative with it and easily justify it.
Oh, the dishes will still be there. I should go email Suzanne about the get-together next week, and then pretty soon you find that you've opened all your emails, browse photo updates from friends on Facebook, bought that handy doodad from Amazon, and oh look, now it's time to take your child to the dentist. The dishes can wait. And they do wait, don't they?
Late that evening, you either stay up past midnight doing the dishes, or they're piled even higher and staring at you when you walk into the kitchen tomorrow morning. Building daily cleaning habits into your life removes the procrastination, so the dishes are always done. If the dishes are done, life feels more manageable. You'll enjoy that feeling and want more.
You'll find yourself throwing the junk mail away right away instead of setting it on your clean counter. It works because you find confidence in your ability to manage something. Once you have a handle on the daily things, laundry, dishes, etc., taking on decluttering tasks won't be so overwhelming. No matter what is going on in life, make your daily home habits a priority and the stress and overwhelm of life will be less.
What does this look like? Head into the kitchen right now and get started. Step one, pull out your trash can, replace the bag if needed. Start picking up all the trash you see in your kitchen, leftover food scraps, junk mail, packaging, etc.
Move quickly, don't overthink. If it's something that needs to be sorted before tossing, then skip over it. I want this to be as fast as possible, so don't let it take more than 20 minutes. After you put this into your daily habits, it should take under 30 seconds.
Once your trash bag is full, take it out to the garbage. If you have a few things piled up and needing to go to the trash, then do that now as well. Trash disposed of, check. Step two, wash a load of dishes.
Just one load. If you have more, it's okay, let them be until it's time to wash dishes again. Don't spend hours doing this task. The point is to see something get done, not exhaust yourself.
Head into the kitchen and do a quick load of dishes. If you have a dishwasher, then load it up and start the dishwasher. If you don't have a dishwasher, let them air dry while you do step three. Dishes done, check.
Step three, wipe down the stove encounters that are already clear. Do not start decluttering the counters. This exercise is simply to clean your current work areas. Stove encounters wiped off, check.
And step four, take five minutes to reward yourself for getting a routine accomplished. Does not have to be anything glamorous, but it needs to be something that you enjoy and can indulge in without shame. Sit and drink a cup of coffee, watch the news, check your email, browse Facebook, etc. Typically those are things that we sneak in and feel ashamed of because we think we should be doing something more productive.
But now you can sit and indulge yourself, knowing that you've already been productive today. You've earned five minutes of me time. The reward is important. If you don't submit the habit into place, it makes you feel good about the work that you've put into it.
Don't be tempted to sleep in longer and skip the five minutes. Make yourself a priority. At five minute break, check. That's it.
You did it. This is your foundation for a clean home, your beginning, and your sustaining. So what now? Commit to doing this for four weeks.
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Take it to Rachel. Habits. That's definitely a top theme that we see here. If you're able to turn this show into a habit, simply listening every single day, I'm sure you're able to build other habits with baby steps.
But the other piece of this is priorities, because for you, organization and decluttering might be a nice to have, but not a major priority. Or you think it's a priority in your life, but in reality, other things end up coming first, which is understandable and fine. But reassessing what our priorities truly are and then checking that we make time for them is important. I talked about this last week already, so I won't go into more detail about that.
You can always listen to episode 2805 or more. But with these articles, sometimes they can just act as a simple spark of motivation and inspiration to get us going. In any case, hopefully it was helpful for you. But I should do it for the minimalist Monday post.
Have a great rest of your Monday, hopefully with some decluttering and organization. And I'll see you tomorrow, where you're optimal life. Oh, wait.