Five minutes in the closet sounds like something out of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which I read a million times while growing up, but didn’t understand what your birthday suit was, for, I think, decades later. There’s a scene in the book where one girl gets her dress pulled up in the bathroom, and all the other girls are horrified that she has her birthday suit on underneath. As a child, I just didn’t comprehend that someone might not be wearing anything under her dress, so imagined that a birthday suit was some kind of one-piece underwear? Kind of like a onesie, is how I imagined it, I guess.
But anyhow, my five minutes in the closet was two days ago, and I decided that I’d use my five minutes of bedroom cleaning time to see how much I could get done in the closet. This is what it looked like when I started:
In the five minutes I had, I figured out why the shoe shelf wouldn’t close all the way (one piece of it had fallen off and was stuck behind the shelf), hung up some clothes (which I always avoid like the plague, and then it takes like 15 seconds) and cleaned up most of the floor. I found my husband’s other pair of gym shorts and a spare Ohio State T-Shirt (you can never have too many…) Then it looked like this:
It is definitely still not perfect, but I was surprised at how much I could get done in five minutes (it’s like a new revelation each and every time I do it, which is almost every day…). Today I spent another five minutes, and I just focused on cleaning out the laundry basket in the corner, so that took the entire five minutes, but stuff got hung up, it got put in the donate bag, it got sorted out to go into the twins’ room. My plan is to get through all the stuff that’s not on the shelves, and then move on to the actual shelves. And then go through my drawers, which barely close and have tons of stuff that can be donated.
This whole bedroom decluttering in five minute increments is not the fastest way to get there, but I’m continually pleased that it’s staying tidy where it’s already been tidied, and that progress is made every week. That’s way better than doing one giant blast and then having it fall apart in a week or so. I also find it far easier to tell myself, hey, self, go clean for five minutes in the closet, as opposed to, hey self, go clean out your closet. It seems overwhelming to try to do the whole thing, but easy to just have to figure out what I can improve for five minutes.
