Yeah I vacuumed the floors, cleaned the kitchen, cooked, cleaned the kitchen again, and the whole apartment still looks like a mess. The vacuum cleaner is full and needs to be emptied, my dog ripped a stuffed animal, my bed is still 'naked', the bathroom & living room are full of clothes, blankets, and stuff I want to do / read / paint 😮💨 I just want to exist in peace.
Hi. I'm going to send this ask to more than one blog because I want to check if I get different types of answers. (Please make sure this ask is anonymous) Do you have any advices for plurals how to clean / tidy your room/house and manage to not make it messy again? Important: nay tips for how to not regret getting rid of items you think aren't important now but still be able to get rid of many items to finally make your house clean?
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Hello, this is an excellent question. Maintaining a clean living space can genuinely help improve and maintain positive mental health, but it can be challenging keeping up with these things as a system. We certainly do not keep our own home totally spotless, but here’s how we go about keeping our living space clean.
1) Chore Chart
We’ve made a list of all the chores we’d ideally like to get done, and assigned one or two chores to each day of the week. We’ll put a big chore list at the bottom of this post under a cut, so you can get some sort of idea about the amount of chores your system might need to do in order to keep your space tidy. Our own chore chart is written on a whiteboard left in our kitchen so we can see it every day.
2) Checklists
Many parts of our system are incredibly motivated by checklists. It feels amazing and productive to be able to check things off as you accomplish tasks. Individual chores can even be broken down into multiple steps so you can have more items to check off, if you’d like. Our chore chart mentioned above is in a checklist format, so parts can cross things off the list as they do them. If your system feels like a checklist might be useful, we cannot stress enough how incorporating a checklist into your routine might be beneficial.
3) Putting things away
This one is tough, particularly for the littles in our system, but putting things away when you’re done using them can have a huge impact on keeping your space clean. Things like:
- Hanging up coats and putting away shoes when you take them off
- Keeping dirty clothes in a bin or hamper
- Returning toys/art supplies/electronics/etc. to where they belong after using them
- Taking dishes, cups, and silverware to the sink/kitchen after eating or drinking
- Throwing away empty wrappers, broken things, and other trash items as you encounter them
And so on. This may be a difficult habit to get into, but if a few of your members who front in your home can commit to keeping this up, your whole system will start to feel the differences.
4) Divvying tasks
In all honesty, our system has a chores part who handles most of our housework. Soft likes it and it works for fluff. However, not every system has a specific headmate who handles or wants to complete domestic tasks. So dividing responsibilities among the willing members of your system can lighten everyone’s workload a bit. You can try making different charts or checklists for different headmates, or include those who want/are able to help out on any sort of chore chart or list you create.
Now, when it comes to getting rid of items… our system is POSIC, and can establish connections and relationships with all sorts of items which can make getting rid of them challenging. Still, this is a necessary part of life. Some things that have more or less worked for us are:
We’re not big minimalists, but we like Marie Kondo’s advice when it comes to getting rid of things to ask yourself: what sparks joy? If an item doesn’t spark joy for yourself or your headmates, consider getting rid of it. We like the idea of thanking the item for its service before letting it go.
We also have one alter who likes to take pictures of things before we get rid of them. Pup then makes little edits of them, pasting little digital stickers, and for us it works as a good way to keep items in our memory without keeping them around physically. This may be weird, but it works for us, so we thought might as well include it.
Also, donating items to thrift stores or charity causes may be easier and more fulfilling than flat-out throwing them away. In this way, you’re parting with items that can still find a good home with someone who could get more use out of it, and not sending a once treasured object off to a landfill.
Goodness, this post got quite long. We’ll go ahead and call it here so it doesn’t get even more carried away. We do hope that something here will be useful for your system. Good luck with keeping your home tidy in the future!
And here is a list of chores that might help you get a feel for how to create your own chore chart:
- Putting away anything that isn’t where it belongs
We hope you and your system can brainstorm to figure out what chores will benefit your home life best. Again, good luck with your endeavors to maintain a clean space going forward!
[The Elements of Physical Chemistry] didn’t offer any insight on how to tidy, but it does contain a more important idea that we all need to understand. ‘Creating order from disorder requires energy and is not thermodynamically favourable...
This was the source of my problem, and the reason we all have to work hard to create and maintain order in our lives. It’s a fundamentally unnatural state, pitting your need for the neat and tidy against the universe’s impulse for fast and loose. It’s not random that things become less ordered over time, it’s simply the destiny of molecular physics.
As someone who has accumulated a substantial number of books, this video on decluttering books has inspired me to trim down my bookshelf dramatically, only keeping those books that I actually need.
“I think we both have chaos in our heads, but we deal with it differently. I handle it by making my surroundings completely orderly, and you handle it by letting it all out into your surroundings.”
-the girl with anxiety to the girl with ADD
This was actually a really cool conversation. We were roommates and realized that the way we set up our surroundings stressed the other out to no end. Both of our solutions? “I just don’t look at your side of the room, and it works out pretty well.”
One of the amazing things I learned from her and our other roommate is that people often just think entirely differently. We operate almost in completely different worlds. We have different need and habits and ways of processing. And if we could all get that, if we could figure out what those things were and balance them, we could work together really well. But at the same time, there were these things that weren’t easily compatible.
I believe in conflict (not bite your head off conflict, but soft, yet direct) to find balance. One of them valued peace (a.k.a. complete lack of disagreement) over all else. This was another thing that caused a great deal of stress. When there was no conflict, I felt that there was no conclusion, no feeling settled for anyone. For her, when I tried to bring things up and ask opinions, she would fight it so hard by simply agreeing to whatever everyone else wanted. This tended to cause such an unsettled feeling in me that I would insist on receiving everyone’s complete, honest opinions. In turn, she would panic and further stress that “whatever you want is great!” The other was able to bring us together by explaining both sides in a way that was logically (although not often emotionally) understood by both.
This was where I learned yet again that the golden rule of “treat people the way you want to be treated” is not quite right. Find out how others want to be treated, then treat them that way. You’ve got to work with people to find solutions. You’ve got to understand that the way something makes you feel is not the way it makes everyone feel. Respect is relative. Kindness is relative. Peace is relative. Success is relative. Sometimes we have to accept discomfort to allow others rest from an interaction that may be ideal for one but can be so uncomfortable to another.
