1. Follow the 1 minute rule.
Can it be picked up, washed, cleaned, straightened, or put away in 1 minute or less? If yes, channel Nike and Just Do It. Often times tasks get neglected or shirked because of the fear they will take forever and eat up your precious time and energy. What people don't realize is the energy it takes to avoid doing something and/or looking at a mess constantly actually eats up more energy than the original task itself! If it takes a minute or less, just do it. Your future self will thank you and your home will look much tidier and more inviting.
2. Take off your shoes.
Practice cleanliness and take off your shoes when you get inside your home. Why track all that dirt and muck around the house? You don't walk around on your hands all day and then touch every surface in your home, do you? Then why should your shoes? Take them off.
3. Become friends with dish washing.
Accept that dishes are a part of life. You eat, you drink, you live, you wash dishes. Dishes should not be left undone overnight. If they must be left undone overnight, do them in the morning. If you don't believe me, read this post about ants taking over my kithen. Personally dish washing is my least favorite chore because it grosses me out to touch other people's half eaten food and dirty dishes, but some people find hand washing dishes to be very zen. I like to rinse them and use the dishwasher. I try to think of it in the grand scheme of things -- how lucky am I to have food on the table and clean water and indoor plumbing that I have dishes to do. (Yes, seriously.)
4. Accept laundry as a part of life and devise a system.
Like dish washing, laundry is simply a part of life. You have clothes, you wear them, they need to be washed. Now that I live in a house instead of an apartment and I don't have to put in quarters to use the machines, I like to do a load of laundry every few days (as opposed to when I lived in an apartment and would wait as long as I possibly could before doing laundry because I hated trekking up and down the stairs and fighting with my neighbors over who got to use the machines.) I live in California so there is a constant drought and we have to be very mindful of how much water we use. When I have a full load of laundry (aka my hamper is full) I wash my clothes. Find a system that works for you. Follow the 1 minute rule and don't take off clothes and pile them around your room. Put them in the hamper and when the hamper is full, do your laundry. That might mean doing laundry a couple of times a week if you have a family/children, or it might mean once a week if you are single and live alone.
5. Make your bed.
If you make your bed first thing in the morning, you will not only feel like you have accomplished something, you will be contributing to the tidiness of your home. (Also how inviting is a made bed at the end of a long day!?)
6. Wipe off the counters.
Every night before bed wipe down the counters -- kitchen, bathroom, etc. Wipe them down and you will be cleaning up the water stains, crumbs, dirt and whatever else has accumulated throughout the day. You will feel so much better waking up to a clean bathroom sink and clean kitchen.
7. Put things in their place and have a place for every thing.
I admit, this is the HARDEST of each of these 7 habits and something I am definitely still working on (especially since I am still not fully moved in yet.) When I start to feel like things don't have a place, I evaluate what I no longer use, need or love and give it away or sell it. There is something very liberating about making sure everything has a place and that way you know what you have and you don't buy duplicates of things! What a waste of money to buy something when you already have it but you just couldn't find it, right?
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I hope you found these 7 habits to a tidier home useful! What habits do you have in place to keep your home tidy?
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