With twins that are now 16 months old, it seems like there’s never more than a few minutes to do anything, and even if it seems like there is, you never know when that time is going to come to a screeching halt.
BUT! I really wanted to make progress on simplifying and getting rid of junk that just floated around and collected and as far as I can tell, spawned into even more junk with no one actually doing anything. In the past, I would have done this as a big clean out, and made lots of giant piles and jokes about how it has to look worse before it gets better, and in the end, it would look a ton better. Except that’s not so doable now. I imagine that if I tried it now, I’d make big piles, and then the babies would wake up, and somehow they’d wander in there and rearrange all the piles, and things would end up who knows where, and then they’d need to be sorted again, and this could be a never-ending process.
So I decided I’d just spend five minutes every morning in our bedroom. And it doesn’t turn out to be every morning, but it’s almost every morning. For the last three weeks, I spend five minutes after I shower and make the bed and before I get the babies up — I set the timer on my phone and everything, and I just pick up and work on stuff until the timer goes off.
I learned a few things along the way. The first was to focus on the floor first. The first five minute cleaning sessions were spent just picking things up off the floor. After the floor was all picked up, for future cleaning sessions, I picked up the floor first, which took far less than five minutes, since by that point it was three toys the babies had dragged in, a random sock and a piece of toilet paper (clean! again from the babies!).
The second thing was that it’s far better to go up and down the stairs three times than it is to make a pile and forget about it. Or, at a minimum, plan on going downstairs and putting things away as the last step. It is NOT OKAY to make a pile and then wander off and leave it at the end of the cleaning time. Then the pile gets dispersed, and it’s back to square one.
The third thing is to have a big trash bin in the room. It doesn’t have to be gigantic, but bigger than the tiny bathroom wastebaskets. This makes it super easy to throw things away, and it’s much better than dragging a plastic bag around that is 1) a suffocation hazard for small children (why do they love to play with plastic so much?) and 2) likely to get tossed underfoot and things will fall out and then you have to spend time remembering if you decided to throw something away or not.
The fourth thing is to work sequentially. I have been moving counterclockwise in a circle, once the floor was clean. I cleaned off the tv shelf, then moved on to the rocking chair that was covered with clothes, and then across the headboard (which took more than a week!) and now I’m almost done with the circle, and next I’ll actually be opening drawers and sorting those out, now that the surfaces are almost clean.
The fifth thing is that while the broken windows theory has been debunked as a way to keep cities clean and crime-free, it sure works at home. I noticed that things just got left out less in general when everything was tidy, because it wasn’t adding to a pile, it was the only thing there. Which sure makes it easier to start the pick up the next morning.
I’m very excited at how successful this strategy has been for me. I’m even excited that the next task will be to clean out the backpack of snacks and things that has been sitting there since May of 2016, when my husband took the boys to Harry Potter world at Universal Studios as a mini-vacation before the twins were born. Those things take up so much mental energy! It’ll be such a relief to just have it gone.
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