Just 15 minutes

So, there's this Flylady website: Flylady.net and it's sort of an organizational/homemaker/cleaning sort of website. You can sign up for emails that come everyday to remind you to do things. She has all these acronyms, like FLYing, which stands for Finally Loving Yourself. And you start out the whole program by shining your kitchen sink. So when your house is a mess and in CHAOS (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome), the program teaches you to get out of that state and get and keep your house and life in order.

She's really encouraging and doesn't tell you that you're just a lazy butt who needs to get your rear off the couch and just DO something; she tells you that you're a perfectionist and the reason your house/life is such a mess is that you don't feel like you have enough time to really do it right. And you follow the adage that "If you can't do something right, why bother doing it?" And of course, as you continue to do that, the problem only gets worse, until Dateline is calling you to do a story on your apartment full of garbage and cats.

So Flylady's mantra is "You can do anything for 15 minutes." You can get your house in order 15 minutes at a time. You can declutter 15 minutes at a time. In fact, she even makes it a rule sometimes that you're not allowed to do it for more than 15 minutes. She says that what happens, is you get going and get all excited and pull out way more work than you can finish in a reasonable amount of time and then you get tired or frustrated or bored and then you've created more of a mess by trying to clean. So, if you limit yourself to only doing what you can do in 15 minutes, then you get something done, but you haven't run out of steam to finish the job and clean up what you've started.

She's also big on routines. They say children thrive on routines, but I think more accurately, people thrive on routines. A lot of us naturally do the same things in the same order every day . Flylady calls these people Born Organized (BO). But some people need help. Flylady calls these people SHEs (Sidetracked Home Executives). I personally hate these boxes because I find myself half in one box and half in the other. I am creative and often get sidetracked and identify quite a bit with SHE behaviour, but I also manage to keep pretty organized, too. As Dan says, "I get shit done." So, you start by doing an evening routine where you shine your sink and set out your clothes and look at your calendar for the next day.

So, you may hear me referring to Flylady a fair bit because I get her jillion emails a day and read most of them and I'm trying to get some order into my life and into my family's life. I'm getting better at getting rid of stuff and making space in our little home for the things we really use and love.

"There are two ways to have enough. One is to aquire more, the other is to desire less."
- GK Chesterton