My girlfriend and I were chit-chatting the other day, as we often do, about trying to keep the house clean and organized. There's always so much to do and precious little time to get it all done. "It's amazing," she said to me, "how much you can get done in one minute."
Going on to explain she continued, "I was warming up my coffee in the microwave oven and in the one minute it took to warm it up I was able to tidy up the kitchen a bit. Within that short amount of time the kitchen looked surprisingly better."
This is one of the reasons why I love her so much - girlfriend wisdom - and she is absolutely right. I am a multitasker. There are very few times when I am waiting for something to heat up, or defrost, or start to boil, or whatever that I just stand around and wait for it to do what it's supposed to do. I'm always cleaning something, or putting the dishes away, or cleaning out the fridge. I don't ever just stand there.
So while my house doesn't look like it's straight out of the pages of some organizing magazine, it is normally pretty picked up. Here are some of the tricks that I use to help it along the way.
Make your bed. Every morning as soon as I get out of bed, I make my bed. Now, while this habit originally started to keep me from climbing back in, it soon became a habit that I liked because it makes my room look neat. It only takes about 45 seconds to make my bed so it's well worth the little bit of time.
Put your clothes away at night. I am one of those people who doesn't get in my pajamas until I am ready to go to bed. However, when I get home from work I will usually go and change out of my work clothes and into something a little more comfortable. When I do that the clothes that I wear to work either get hung back up or go in the hamper. It's very tempting to just let them lay on the floor, but it takes less than a minute to get everything put away.
Wash your dishes as you cook. I dislike cooking in a messy kitchen -- there's just too much clutter and then I can't think straight. So when I am cooking I will always have a tub full of soapy water at the ready. Then, as I cook, I can wash items as I go. Doing this adds no additional time to meal prep and has the added benefit of decreasing my dishwashing time. By the time my meal is done I usually only have one or two items to wash after I eat my dinner. As an added bonus, the soapy water is great for a quick wash-up for messy hands as you cook and you won't have to turn on the tap with dirty hands.
Sort the mail when you bring it inside. Open everything up, put the bills in the bill spot, the coupons in the coupon spot, the newspapers in the newspaper spot, the things you want to look at later in their own spot, and recycle all the rest. Takes less than a minute and your kitchen table will thank you.
The five minute reshuffle. Inevitably things end up in places where they are not supposed to be. You carry this item from one place and leave it in another. I am fortunate that I can have a person come in and clean my house; however, she won't go around and pick up all my clutter. So the night before she cleans I need to spend a few minutes tidying up the place.
My solution: grab one of your re-usable shopping bags and make a quick sweep around the house going through room by room. As you go through each room grab anything that doesn't belong in that room and put it in the bag. With each subsequent room you may be able to grab something out of the bag and put it in it's place within the current room. If you're like me, most things will either need to be returned to the bathroom or the kitchen. One trip through the whole house and in five minutes everything has been returned to it's proper place.
So there you have it -- a few suggestions to help keep our houses a little less cluttered, and it only took a minute.
Showing posts with label living a single life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label living a single life. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Thursday, December 11, 2014
When Expectations Don't Match Reality
What do you want to be when you grow up? While I'm still trying to answer that question, recent events have made me realize that life looks a lot different now then it did when I was little.
When I was little I wanted to be lots of different things: horse trainer, mathematician, astronomer, veterinarian, geologist. My love of animals, the outdoors, and of numbers came through in how I thought I would spend my grown-up life.
When I graduated from high school and ended up working instead of going to college, my dreams of any job that required a higher education were put by the wayside.
Then marriage and more working; and it wasn't until I was in my late twenties that I decided that I wanted to have a family--and a big one at that. I loved the good old-fashioned role of housekeeping where my inner Martha Stewart would come out. However, fate didn't have that in the cards for me as it's hard to have a lot of children when you're divorced (not impossible, mind you, but not how I envisioned it), and working full-time kept me out of school.
Being single throughout the rest of my child-bearing years cemented the fact that I would only end up with one child and not six; but that's okay because as a single person I have learned how to be self-sufficient and I was able to shower my attentions on one child.
More than anything, however, I want to spend time with family. While that has nothing to do with what I want to be when I grow up, it does have to do with what the picture in your head of your adult life looks like as you grow up.
Spending the holidays in a home surrounded by family and in the midst of countless holiday traditions are my "visions of sugarplums" that dance in my head. Expectations had me wishing for one thing. Reality, however, turned out quite differently.
As my family has become scattered across the globe and their family dynamics have them pulled in different directions for the holidays, I find myself spending a lot of time alone trying not to think about everyone else surrounded by their families.
So what do you do when your expectations don't match reality? You change your expectations to something that's more attainable.
For example: I have a friend from church who didn't want to stress herself too much over the holidays because her job was changing and she had a lot to think about. So she chose to spend Thanksgiving in reflection and meditation. She got some much needed answers and was thankful for the time alone.
For me, while I do get to spend some time with my family, I also spend much of the holidays with friends and their families. It's starting new traditions with my best friend like having a cookie decorating day (or days) and sharing the grocery shopping madness together before each of the holidays.
I have also learned to change my definition of "family". Those I consider family now, while not related by blood, are related to me by the experiences and friendships that we share.
The holidays are tough on those of us who are alone. As long as we manage our expectations we should be able to get through all this craziness in one piece.
When I was little I wanted to be lots of different things: horse trainer, mathematician, astronomer, veterinarian, geologist. My love of animals, the outdoors, and of numbers came through in how I thought I would spend my grown-up life.
When I graduated from high school and ended up working instead of going to college, my dreams of any job that required a higher education were put by the wayside.
Then marriage and more working; and it wasn't until I was in my late twenties that I decided that I wanted to have a family--and a big one at that. I loved the good old-fashioned role of housekeeping where my inner Martha Stewart would come out. However, fate didn't have that in the cards for me as it's hard to have a lot of children when you're divorced (not impossible, mind you, but not how I envisioned it), and working full-time kept me out of school.
Being single throughout the rest of my child-bearing years cemented the fact that I would only end up with one child and not six; but that's okay because as a single person I have learned how to be self-sufficient and I was able to shower my attentions on one child.
More than anything, however, I want to spend time with family. While that has nothing to do with what I want to be when I grow up, it does have to do with what the picture in your head of your adult life looks like as you grow up.
Spending the holidays in a home surrounded by family and in the midst of countless holiday traditions are my "visions of sugarplums" that dance in my head. Expectations had me wishing for one thing. Reality, however, turned out quite differently.
As my family has become scattered across the globe and their family dynamics have them pulled in different directions for the holidays, I find myself spending a lot of time alone trying not to think about everyone else surrounded by their families.
So what do you do when your expectations don't match reality? You change your expectations to something that's more attainable.
For example: I have a friend from church who didn't want to stress herself too much over the holidays because her job was changing and she had a lot to think about. So she chose to spend Thanksgiving in reflection and meditation. She got some much needed answers and was thankful for the time alone.
For me, while I do get to spend some time with my family, I also spend much of the holidays with friends and their families. It's starting new traditions with my best friend like having a cookie decorating day (or days) and sharing the grocery shopping madness together before each of the holidays.
I have also learned to change my definition of "family". Those I consider family now, while not related by blood, are related to me by the experiences and friendships that we share.
The holidays are tough on those of us who are alone. As long as we manage our expectations we should be able to get through all this craziness in one piece.
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