How do you really feel about the state of the house? Here’s a quick test: imagine a doorbell ringing. Is there a panic deep within you over the possibility of unexpected guests — or bill collectors? You are not alone. For many people, chaos, disorganization, and dirt interfere with the daily affairs of life at home.
Aiming at chaos is a great first step towards a more sustainable life. Overcome household clutter and live a greener life with these tips:
▪ Pocket the bag. Keep reusable shopping bags on hooks near the car keys. They’ll be easy to grab when you’re out the door — and will stop supermarket plastic sacks from invading your organized home.
▪ Garbage trash. Removing your address from direct mail databases and calling catalog companies with quit requests takes time up front, but saves the household—and Mother Earth!—from being buried in unwanted paper.
▪ Release the excess. Recycling or reusing unneeded tools, clothing, tools, and craft supplies not only frees up storage space, but also gives these items a new and useful life.
▪ Garbage packaging trash. Smart menu planning means less reliance on one-size-fits-all or convenience foods—and a corresponding reduction in unnecessary food packaging. Build a pantry and buy in bulk to minimize packaging waste.
Sounds preposterous? Not for the nearly 40 percent of us who find it difficult to keep a clean and orderly home. In 2015, the Soap and Detergent Association in the US surveyed women’s attitudes about cleanliness. Of the respondents, 21 percent, who were called “Warriors”, spend the most time cleaning but feel the most desperate about the state of their homes. Another group, the “Dirt Dodgers,” which make up 18 percent of proceeds, clean only when absolutely necessary—and find it difficult to keep their homes neat and orderly.
Impossible standards
Add them all up and you have us: four out of ten people our lives at home challenge. For all our numbers, we may as well be invisible. Modern media hits us with warped standards of perfection.
Even in real life, we seldom see the truth about the chaos and chaos of our neighbors. At a friend’s holiday open house, we admired a beautiful home, but didn’t realize it was achieved only by tossing dirty clothes, surface clutter, and piles of newspapers into a padlocked bathroom.
The perfect tone: the rich and the lacking
Be careful: you are not lazy, crazy or stupid. You just need to learn the necessary skills to create a clean and orderly home. Think of innate organizing abilities as a kind of musical pitch. Some people have very little—they are the “lead ears” of the music world. Others have perfect pitch: an innate, accurate sense of which notes are and the relationships between them. We all struggle at scales in between.
In the same way, some people naturally have an orderly relationship with their things. They keep things in order without a second thought, and they live their home life without a single hair. They have the home management equivalent of the perfect tune hardwired into their brains.
The rest of us have to work to learn organizational skills. But just as we master the musical scales and intervals, we can master planning and scheduling, cleaning, and clutter control. And, like a well-rehearsed recital, our organizing skills strengthen and become a part of us when we use them.
“Most of us are not born with organizational skills. It is something we have to learn.”
Children’s toys are one of the main breeding grounds for chaos and disorder. Learning the necessary skills can help even the organizationally challenged to keep problems under control.
Doing what doesn’t come naturally
Problems arise when the two camps try to communicate. Tell someone who has been gifted with great organizational skills about your new menu plan, and you’re likely to go, “Huh? Doesn’t everyone do that?” On the other hand, it is not always possible to benefit from the experiences of naturally organized people. For them, it comes easy, so they cut corners, assuming the rest of us can keep up.
Organized people naturally write too many books on home organization. It’s easy for them, so it should be easy for the reader, right?
Wrong. It takes someone to know someone—and to teach someone.
Alison Malone is a blogger and advocate for the rental lifestyle. The website is Rent a house. He writes about issues surrounding the body and mind.
