Let me ask you a question. How do you feel about your home? Is it a haven fom the busy world of work–somewhere you can retreat to relax, indulge your passions and hobbies, share conversation with friends or family?
That’s how I’d like my home to be. Instead I often allow it to become a place where I wage war against regular chores, which I turn upside down to find the renewal form for my car insurance or that cheque I had to pay in, and where I struggle to cram another object into an already full cupboard. Sound familiar?
There’s only one consequence of this type of habitual behaviour: it robs us of time. Time is precious and limited. Using it unwisely can lead to stress ("Sorry I’m late….again") and introspection ("I haven’t achieved what I wanted out of life, and I’m running out of time"). Many of us complain that there aren’t enough hours in the day but have you ever really tracked how you spend them?
A few years ago I was unhappy in my job and was spending several hours each day in front of the TV. It’s time I’ll never get back, and I can’t honestly say I got anything good out of it. But we do this. Why? It’s mindless. We don’t have to think. It’s an escape from the day-to-day reality of living when we’re not enjoying our lives. Nowadays I use the TV in moderation, for relaxation or as background noise. It’s not the bad habit it once was.
But there is more you can do to create space and time in your life. Here are a few tips for making life easier around the house, to help you regain control of your chores and put more time into doing the things you love:
1) De-clutter
Whether you have an hour, a day or a weekend to do it, try and make a start at eliminating the unnecessary items you’re storing in your home. That means the junk mail, the clothes you haven’t worn for at least a year, the empty shampoo bottles, the ‘handy things I’m keeping in case I need them one day’, everything in the kitchen which has passed its use-by date, the old towels/facecloths/dusters/bed linen which never get used etc etc. When de-cluttering it’s easy to get overwhelmed, so why not stick to one small area and finish it in the time you’ve allocated. Set a timer if you need a deadline to work toward, or an incentive to stop. Reward yourself with a nice cup of coffee when you’re done.
2) Assign logical "homes" for items
This can be done alongside de-cluttering, or just as you go about your daily life. Often we can’t find things because they don’t have a logical or permanent home. For years I never polished or cared for my shoes regularly enough. My shoe polish was in a cupboard under the sink. Since I moved my shoe shine kit to my wardroe, right next to the shoes (!) I use it far more often. Simple. And now I know exactly where that item lives.
3) Wage war on paper
There’s so much nowadays that comes through the letterbox, or we bring into the house ourselves. First of all, is there any way you can establish a routine where you open your mail above an outdoor recycling bin, immediately throwing away every scrap of paper you don’t need so that it never sets foot in the house at all? If that’s impractical the next best step is to have the same routine but use an indoor bin. At least then the paper you need in the main living area is kept to a minimum.
The next thing which will really help here is to assign a resting place for all incoming paper - that’s a place where you can put things until they are filed. Like an unsorted email inbox. Realistically the vast majority of us won’t file each piece of paper as we go along, so this makes it easy to find things in the meantime. If it’s not in the assigned tray/shelf/drawer it must have been filed in the appropriate place.
4) Have a cleaning schedule
Enlist help for this if you can. I have a weekly schedule where every room is cleaned very basically - vacuum, dust, clear things away, clean the bathroom and kitchen surfaces. But each week, after that’s all done, there is a list of tasks that go one step further. Things like cleaning the oven, defrosting the fridge, cleaning the windows or mirrors, cleaning skirting boards, changing water filters, etc. Only one task on the list is completed each week, depending on the time available. Some people like to tackle one room at a time, others prefer to do it all in one hit.
5) Don’t multi-task
Counter-intuitive to a lot of us, but when multi-tasking is actually a polite way of saying we’re getting distracted from a task and doing something else instead, we’re not being effective. If you catch yourself doing this, stop. Focus on the task in hand and if you’re reminded about something else that needs doing in the process simply write it down on a notebook to do it later. An example of this is when you’re clearing a space in the living room and bring coffee cups into the kitchen. Instead of placing the cups on the side and going back to the living room, you wash all the dishes, then put them away, then start cleaning the kitchen surfaces. Then you return to your half-finished living room and your cleaning time is up. You might have a clean kitchen now, but when you set your priority for that day it was the living room you wanted to work on, and now you’ve got to achieve two tasks instead of one in the allotted time.
These are only a few ideas for making life easier in the home. We all have routines that help us - even of we think we detest routine! After all, homes are to be enjoyed and there’s nothing better than coming in from a hard day’s work to a clean, tidy and well-organised space.
