Cleaning

• Don’t take on a cleaning project that can’t be finished in a day.If it takes longer than a day, you probably won’t ever finish it and it will be more of a mess than when you started.

• Try not to handle things twice. Put things away as soon as you find them. If you put it in a “To sort later” pile, you probably won’t sort it later and it will be a box of stuff somewhere else.
• Get rid of stuff! Have a memory about it, enjoy for a minute, and get rid of it if you’re not using it. Keeping stuff around just for memories junks up your future (unless you have unlimited storage space, which you do not!).
• If you think you might need to keep something “just in case you need it later”, just consider the last time you needed to use it. If it was more than a year ago, get rid of it and borrow one when you really need it.
• Don’t clean and organize to please some fantasy where everything is perfect and orderly and people put things back immediately. Organize around how you really live and try to make things as easy as possible to put away.
• If you have more stuff in one area that can’t be put away in 10-15 minutes, you have too much and you need to get rid of it!
• Did you do something fun today? Are your kids happy? Is your husband happy? Are YOU happy? If not, just stop cleaning today already, give yourself a break, and pick up where you left off tomorrow. If mom ain’t happy, ain’t no one happy!