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Podcast Summary: "How to Get Started Decluttering"

Podcast: A Slob Comes Clean with Dana K. White
Episode: 002 – How to Get Started Decluttering
Date: September 10, 2013

Overview

In this episode, Dana K. White continues sharing her “slob story,” tracing how her challenges with messiness and clutter developed over the years and shaped her home life. She offers reality-based cleaning and organizing advice by candidly describing her own struggles and revelations. The episode focuses on the mindset shifts necessary for lasting decluttering, recounts practical experiences that led her to new approaches, and closes with a simple, actionable decluttering tip anyone can use.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Reality of “Slob Brain” (00:01–05:00)

Dana sets the stage by emphasizing her reality-based, non-judgmental approach.
- Quote: “The dirty little secret about most organizing advice is that it’s written by people who like to organize. And I’m not one of those people. Their brain does not work the way my brain does.” (00:27)
She shares her background: lifelong struggle with messiness, persistent belief that “the next phase” (becoming a mom, etc.) would magically solve her disorganization.

2. The Wake-Up Call (05:00–13:45)

Recalls a poignant moment: seeing her infant son’s room a mess and recognizing, for the first time, that this issue wouldn’t just vanish.
- Felt frustration at the cycle: “If I was making progress … I felt like I was just hanging on by my fingernails.” (08:30)
Admits she wasn’t a hoarder but needed extensive warning to host events; her strategy was to shove clutter into the master bedroom and lock the door.
- Memorable Anecdote: Training her husband not to mention the locked bedroom to guests. (09:50)
Describes the party-cleaning routine: one week for decluttering (i.e., hiding stuff), another for cleaning, only to see disaster return in days.
- Quote (with humor): “Every time the house would be perfectly clean, I would look at [my husband] and I would say, ‘This is how I like it. I’m just gonna keep it this way.’ And then we would both throw our heads back and laugh and laugh and laugh…” (13:20)

3. The Flawed Maintenance Mindset (13:45–17:20)

Details her (then) logical but misguided idea: wait until the entire house is clean before maintaining it.
- Insight: She eventually realizes lasting change comes from forming habits first, not after a giant overhaul.

4. Life Changes and Clutter Compounding (17:20–29:00)

With young children, Dana’s frustration mounts—she’s not enjoying the social home life she imagined because her mess prevents it.
Discovers the “decluttering bug” in January (“I didn’t know that January is the time when everybody gets a decluttering bug…”), kickstarting her first real attempts at decluttering, especially of unused wedding gifts.
Starts selling on eBay, spurred by a friend's encouragement and a 10-cent garage sale item selling for $17.41.
Quote: “I had bought it for 10 cents and I sold it for $17 and I was hooked.” (25:30)
Garage sale shopping intensifies, but most purchases end up being unsellable—causing the home to fill with redundant items “coming in at a rate of 15 to 1” compared to things leaving. (27:35)
Admits eBay selling was more fun than cleaning—a key insight into how distractions can contribute to clutter.

5. The Move that Highlighted the Problem (29:00–34:00)

Moving house revealed the true extent of Dana's clutter after packing “enough stuff for a 3,000 square foot house” into a new, much smaller home—excluding the large amount left to stage the old house for sale.
Perspective: This exemplified years of accumulation outpacing decluttering.

6. Systems and Habits That Work: Weekly Cleaning (34:00–42:00)

After the story, Dana transitions to her current week and shares specifics about her daily and weekly cleaning habits.
Emphasizes the need for routines to combat what she humorously calls "Time Passage Awareness Disorder" (TPAD), her tendency to lose track of the last time she did a task (36:50).
Assigns specific days for household tasks (e.g., Mondays for laundry, Tuesdays for bathrooms), reducing opportunity for procrastination and guilt.
- Quote: “By having certain days for certain cleaning tasks, I am much better able to be aware of how long it's been since I did that.” (38:10)
Reveals a “lightbulb moment”: cleaning the shower while in the shower is practical and eliminates aversions (like getting her clothes wet).
- Humor: “To clean the shower, you have to climb in it. Well, you know what? If you clean the shower while you're taking a shower, you don't have to worry about getting your clothes wet because you're not wearing any.” (41:30)

7. Decluttering Tip You Can Use Now: Do the Easy Stuff First (42:00–44:30)

Addresses paralysis when beginning to declutter—her strategy:
- “Do the easy stuff first.”
Remove items that already have a designated home elsewhere before tackling things without a set place.
- Example Quote: “The easy stuff is the stuff that has a place somewhere other than in this space… I take the ladder out of the laundry room and I take it to the garage right then.” (43:10)
Success through visible progress: “Visually, I can look into that room and it's no longer as overwhelming as it was when I started.” (43:52)

Timestamps for Major Segments

00:01–05:00: Introduction, laying out the frustration with traditional organizing methods
05:00–13:45: Dana’s realization her disorganization is a recurring, deeper issue
13:45–17:20: The maintenance mindset and why it fails
17:20–29:00: Selling on eBay, the escalation of stuff, and the emotional high/low of decluttering through reselling
29:00–34:00: The move—visualizing the true scale of clutter in Dana's life
34:00–41:30: Creating weekly routines (“Time Passage Awareness Disorder”), practical cleaning tips
42:00–44:30: Decluttering tip: Do the easy stuff first

Notable Quotes

On being different from typical organizing gurus:
“The dirty little secret about most organizing advice is that it’s written by people who like to organize. And I’m not one of those people.” (00:27)
On pre-party cleaning:
“I spent the first week decluttering, which actually just meant take everything and shove it in the master bedroom … and lock it when you’re done. Because I do not want anybody back there.” (09:50)
On unrealistic promises:
“Every time the house would be perfectly clean, I would look at him and I would say, ‘This is how I like it. I’m just gonna keep it this way.’ And then we would both throw our heads back and laugh and laugh and laugh…” (13:20)
On eBay decluttering gone wrong:
“They were probably coming in at a rate of 15 to 1, you know, to the things that were leaving my house.” (27:35)
On time-awareness and routines:
“By having certain days for certain cleaning tasks, I am much better able to be aware of how long it’s been since I did that.” (38:10)
On cleaning the shower while showering:
“Well, you know what? If you clean the shower while you’re taking a shower, you don’t have to worry about getting your clothes wet because you’re not wearing any.” (41:30)
Decluttering mantra:
"Do the easy stuff first. The easy stuff is the stuff that has a place somewhere other than in this space." (43:10)

Actionable Takeaways

Start building habits now—wait for “the whole house” to be clean and you’ll just start the cycle again.
Assign cleaning to specific days to help keep track, reduce guilt, and prevent tasks from piling up unknowingly.
When overwhelmed, focus first on removing items already out of place. This creates instant visual progress and is an easy on-ramp to a bigger decluttering project.

This episode is a candid, gently humorous, highly relatable account of why decluttering is so hard—and how to break out of the self-defeating cycle by starting small and building momentum with simple habits and easy early wins. If you’ve ever stared at a messy room and felt stuck, Dana’s “do the easy stuff first” rule is a non-intimidating invitation to begin.

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Transcript1 lines

[00:02]
A
Hi, welcome to A Slob Comes Clean, the podcast. This is podcast number two. I'm Dana White. I am Noni at A Slob Comes Clean. That is where I blog every day of the week, just about. And I share my personal deslobification journey. I share reality based cleaning and organizing tips based on my reality, which is that I don't like that stuff. The dirty little secret about most organizing advice is that it's written by people who like to organize. And I'm not one of those people. Their brain does not work the way my brain does. So as I figure things out that work with my slob brain, then I share those things with you. Okay? So on today's podcast, I'm excited to be here. I am going to share with you part two of my Slob story. I shared part one last week. I'm also going to be sharing just what's going on around here as I get back on track after the summer. This is our second week of the school year, so things are starting to get back into routine. But I still have a lot to do. And then last of all, before we go, I will give you a decluttering tip that you can take and apply in your home today. But before that, I do want to remind you that for show notes, links to things that I mention here on the podcast, you can go to aslobcomesclean.com podcasts with an S on the end. You can also find me at aslobcamsclean.com connect that has links to all of my social media channels all over the Internet so you can find me everywhere. I also want to remind you that all of my ebooks this month of September 2013 are on sale using the code habit. You can get 28 days to hope for your home, which is not for the mildly disorganized. You can get that for $3 with the code Habit. You can get Drowning in clutter for $3 as well with that same code habit, H A B I T all caps. Or you can get the two ebook set those two ebooks for $5 through the end of September. And Teaching Kids to Clean is also available for $3 as well, but that one is only on Amazon at this point. And on Amazon you don't need the coupon code. So just want to remind you those things before we get started. Okay, so last week I shared with you part one of my slob story. Not my sob story, but my slob story. And basically in a nutshell, it was that, yeah, I've always been A slob. I have always been messy. I've always struggled with this. And I ended at the point where I was in my child's room, my oldest child, my first child, when he was four months old. So I was new to this mom thing. It basically was the fulfillment of my entire life dream. I could not wait to be a mother. And I had counted my whole entire life on the fact I really just assumed that once I was a mother and that was my job, that my house would magically be clean. It never occurred to me that I really had some sort of an actual problem that kept my house from being clean. I had great excuses, always and just assumed the next phase of my life was going to be suddenly neat and perfect, but it wasn't. And when my son was four months old, I looked around his room one day and I realized that it was a complete disaster. It was a mess. And he was four months old and he couldn't even crawl yet. So it wasn't his fault. It was completely my fault. And it was the first time that it really kind of sank in that I had a problem, that this wasn't just something that was going to magically go away, that I really. There was something wrong and I didn't understand it. But it was still quite a few years before I started making progress. I would try. I would do great. I could go a week, two weeks, sometimes three weeks if I was really, really lucky, where life was just normal and we had this very simple routine and I would keep things under control at that point. But then life would happen. Anything, it could be something good, something bad. Anything out of the routine would happen, as happens all the time in life. And my house would immediately go back to being a complete disaster. I just felt like I was. If I was making progress, if I was keeping my house under control, I felt like I was just hanging on by my fingernails. I really, truly just knew that at any moment it was going to go back to being the way it was. And it was a real frustration. Now I do want to explain that I could have people over. I was not a hoarder. As I go on in my story, I'll kind of share how I got a little bit closer to being a hoarder. But I wasn't a hoarder. I wasn't someone who couldn't have someone over. I was actually very social. I liked having people over. I just needed warning. I had to have two weeks to have a party, to have a real party in my home. I needed two weeks to get Ready? I spent the first week decluttering, which actually just meant take everything and shove it in the master bedroom, because that was the room where I could lock the door and keep people out. And funny note on that, which was not funny to me at all at the time, is I had to train my husband to not say anything because I cannot tell you how many times we would have a party and my husband would need to get in the bedroom, and he would come out into the middle of the party and he would say, hey, Dana, the bedroom door is locked. Do you know why our master bedroom door is locked? I would say, no reason, honey. And I finally would expect explained to him. I finally remembered before a party to explain to him. Please do not mention that this is where the key is. If you need to get into the bedroom during the party, use the key, don't say anything, close the door behind you and lock it when you're done. Because I do not want anybody back there. I mean, it was. I would just. It was like a storage unit. I would throw everything in there, and that was how it went for a party. And the second week I would spend cleaning because the first week I had to declutter, and the second week I cleaned because you can't actually clean when there's clutter everywhere. So, yeah, that's basically how my life went. And I would get my house ready for a party, and I would look around and I would say, this is how I like my house. This is what I want my house to look like. I don't want to live the other way. I like it like this. I can get it like this. And I would tell myself I was going to maintain it. And then two days later, I would wake up. Not that I slept for two days, but two days later I would wake up and I would look around and go, what happened? Because it was back to being exactly what it was, if not worse than it was before the party. And I didn't understand what happened in those two or three days between party ready and total disaster. I really didn't know what happened in that time in between. Which leads me to just my mentality at that time. And it was my mentality for a very, very long time. And it wasn't until I really focused and started what I now call my d slob process. It wasn't until then that I actually realized that this was wrong. But my mentality, which was extremely logical and I think a lot of people have this mentality, was that I needed to get my house completely clean from Top to bottom, and then start maintaining it, because that just made sense. I mean, what was the point of trying to keep up with daily things when my whole house was just a complete pigsty? I just. I didn't. It didn't make sense to my brain. So as I keep on going through sharing this story, I will explain how I've realized that's absolutely not the way to do things that you do need to start with the habits or else those big cleaning sessions never actually have any real effect and don't give me any traction in my house. But. So anyway, this was my phase of life that I was in. I had young children staying home full time. Everything was. It was a fun time of life. I absolutely loved being a mother. But my house was a real source of frustration. I found. I started realizing that I was not having play dates. You know, I wasn't inviting people over the way I wanted to. I dreaded somebody just accidentally showing up. I wanted to be the mom who could say, hey, sure, yeah, let's have so and so come over and play. But. But I couldn't because my house was a complete disaster. And so it was a real frustration to me as I was realizing how the state of my home was greatly affecting the way that I wanted to live my life. And the way that I had pictured that phase of my life being all my life, I just assumed that I would be the mom who would have people over all the time. And I wasn't able to do that because I was tired from having kids, which meant that the marathon cleaning sessions that would be required to have people over, that they just couldn't happen like they did before I had kids. And so that was something that was frustrating and surprising to me. So, like I said in the party times, you know, we would get the house perfectly clean. And this was my husband's. And my joke is, every time the house would be perfectly clean, I would look at him and I would say, this is how I like it. I'm just gonna keep it this way. And then we would both throw our heads back and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh, because we knew that that was never going to happen. Maybe the first 10 times I said it in our marriage, he thought, oh, great, I'm so excited that it's going to stay this way. But by the third or fourth year, yeah, we pretty much knew that was never going to happen. And that was a big joke to even think that that was ever going to stay like that. Okay, so about five years into my marriage, so I Had, I guess, probably a 2 year old and an infant. My kids were 20 months apart. My two boys. One January, I got the bug, the decluttering bug. I did not know at the time, I honestly didn't know that January is the time when everybody gets a decluttering bug. I thought it was just me, so I just went with it. I said, okay, I am done. I am sick of this. I am so tired of all this clutter and I am going to start decluttering my house. I am sick of it. And we'd been married for five years. Looking around, I realized that a lot of my cabinets were full of wedding gifts that had never been used in five years. And something about that five year mark just made me say, I don't want to do that. I don't want to keep these things that haven't been used in five years. If I haven't used them in that time, I'm probably never going to use them. And so I started selling on ebay. I had a friend who sold on ebay. She had sold for a long time. She made things and she had deals with different suppliers. And so she was an ebay seller. And she had encouraged me to do this. And I thought, well, I'm just gonna try it. So I, you know, I sold a juicer, a little milkshake, blender, you know, completely pointless thing, but looked really cool. And like I told you last time, we got everything we registered for. So I had registered for it because it looked neat. And then we'd never used it, of course, so, you know, things like that. I started selling on ebay and I started kind of learning how to do that. It was pretty cool. Well, during the time before I started selling on ebay, a friend of mine and I had started shopping at garage sales. You know, we were in a time of our life where we didn't have a lot of money. I was staying home, two kids, you know, money was tight. And this friend and I, on Friday mornings we would get up and get, get going early, early in the morning we had kids the same age and they would sit in the car seats and we would go to garage sales. And because we went together, one of us could hop out and look and one of us stay in the car with the kids and then we'd switch and we just had a great time doing this. And it was really fun because, you know, I kind of got to satisfy my little shopping urge that I would have, but I got to do it for like three bucks, you know, would get some Stuff and everything, get clothes for the kids and all that kind of stuff for really cheap. And so we had really been having fun at garage sales. Well, I had started selling on EB and I know I said it was January, but I live in Texas, so there are garage sales in January. And I remember going to a garage sale and I suddenly had this ebay thing in my mind. And I looked and I saw something on the table and it was 10 cents. It was a little bedazzler, but it was really old, it was all metal, it wasn't plastic and cheap looking. It was in a really old looking box. And it just looked neat and interesting. And I thought, huh, for 10 cents, what in the world could it hurt for me to try to see if that might be able to sell on eBay? Because 10 cents is basically free, right? Anyway, so I, I picked it up, I went home, I put it on ebay and it sold for $17.41, something like that. It was $17 and something. And so I had bought it for 10 cents and I sold it for $17 and I was hooked. I suddenly started looking at garage sales in a completely different way because you have to remember, this is five years into my marriage. I had a two year old. So when you have a two year old and you're staying home full time, there's really not a lot of ways to make money. And this was the first money that I had made since he was born. And we were in a place where we were really tight financially anyway. So the, you know, making basically $17 in free money was really, really exciting to me because I just hadn't even had a way to make money. So I started looking at garage sales differently and I started buying things at garage sales and I would just grab, grab whatever I saw that I thought might work. And then I would get home and I would look it up on ebay. And sometimes I would find that I had gotten a great thing that I could, you know, buy for 50 cents. And I, you know, I was going to sell it for $20, whatever, and that was great. But then probably 75% of the time I would come home thinking, oh, what is this? I'm going to go look it up on ebay. And I'd already bought it, so I already had it in my hand, it was mine, not theirs anymore. And I would look it up on ebay and find, oh, that's really not worthless, that's really not worth anything. That's worthless. So it wasn't worth me, you know, putting it up on ebay and going through all of that for the money that I would get for it. Well, those things that didn't sell on ebay, they started cluttering up my house because I didn't really need it personally. I had only bought it to sell it on ebay. And then I found out it wasn't gonna make me any money, so I wasn't gonna sell it. So it just sat in my house. And then I started kind of learning more and more about ebay. And so I would have bought a coat, but, you know, January is really not the best time to sell a coat. You need to sell a coat back in the fall before it gets cold. You know, this is really not the time when you're gonna get the most money. So I would find a coat at a garage sale, and I would think, well, I'm gonna save it until it's time to sell it later on. And that's with a lot of things, Any type of clothing on ebay. You know, it's by the season. And so I would buy things no matter what the season. I would just store it. And I had more and more and more, more stuff in our house because of ebay. So the things were not leaving my house at the same rate that they were coming in. They were probably coming in at a rate of 15 to 1, you know, to the things that were leaving my house. So my house became more and more cluttered, and as it became more and more cluttered, I was spending more and more time selling on ebay. I mean, selling on ebay is time consuming. People don't. It's not a get rich quick scheme. It's something where you really do have to work. You have to research, you have to clean, you have to package and all that. Well, that was so much more fun than cleaning my house. And cleaning my house was getting harder and harder anyway, because, you know, there was more stuff in it than there ever had been before. So my house started getting really, really cluttered more than it was. Anyway. Let's see, my oldest son was about three and a half, and we found out that we were moving. My husband got a different job in a different town, and so we were going to move, and it was time to start packing things up. And I knew that we needed to get our house on the market. And I had a friend who said to me, you've just got to get your house on the market no matter what. You just have to do it, because you never know when those buyers are going to be there. But I couldn't, I couldn't get my house on the market immediately because my house was such a disaster. And so instead I had to package things up and box things up and stick things in the garage just to get to my. Get my house to the point where I could let a realtor come in and look at it and see, you know, about getting it on the market. So it was time for us to move and my husband went ahead and he went on without us to where we were going to be moving to. And it took about two weeks before I decided that there was no way I could stay by myself with two little boys and try to keep the house perfect with my personality for it to be shown all the time. And we decided that as a family, we needed to be together. And we rented a house to live in until our house sold. Now, the house we rented was about 1500 square feet. We were moving from a house that was 1750 square feet and we filled a moving truck that was supposed to fit enough stuff for a 3,000 square foot house. And that didn't even include all of our biggest furniture that we were leaving inside of our old house to keep it, you know, looking nice for showings. So there we were taking 3000 square feet worth of stuff to a 1500 square foot house and leaving basically everything that someone would need to survive in a 1750 square foot house. That just gives you a little perspective on how much stuff we had and how much stuff we were dealing with at that phase in our life. And that's where I'm going to end the Slob Story part two. And next week I will share with you part three. Okay, so the other thing that I said I was going to talk about in this podcast is just my week this week. It's been the second week of back to school since we went back to school. And I'm getting back on track. I'm focusing on my daily habits, which include running the dishwasher every single night, emptying it every single morning as soon as I get up, and keeping just the basics, the basic things done that I go through in 28 days to hope for your home and doing those things help me gain real traction in my house. The other thing that I've been doing is focusing on my weekly cleaning tasks. Now, when I started my blog at a point of total desperation, I didn't even worry about my weekly cleaning tasks until I think I'd been going almost a year, maybe seven or eight months. But I those daily tasks will help get your house out of complete disaster. But once I felt like I had those under control, I added in weekly cleaning tasks. Now, here's my logic. For weekly cleaning tasks, I have what I call time passage awareness disorder, meaning I can go a really long time not grasping how long it's been since the last time I cleaned my toilet. So by having certain days for certain cleaning tasks, I am much better able to be aware of how long it's been since I did that. Like, for example, Monday is laundry day for me. And I'll talk about that in a future podcast how that works for us. But that means that when Monday comes around, I know, oh, it's Monday. I need to do my laundry. Otherwise I can go many, many days thinking, oh, I should really do laundry. Oh, I don't have time to do laundry. Oh, I need to do laundry. Wow, I have got to stop everything and do laundry. Whereas it is now because Monday is laundry day. When Monday comes along, I do laundry. And even if I don't get it all done, I still made a major effort on Monday because that's laundry day. Now laundry has to be done. You know, people have to have clean underwear. At least my family thinks they do. But anyway, people have to have clean underwear. You've got to be able to have clean clothes to keep living through life. Well, now, bathrooms can be ignored a little more than that. So bathrooms are Tuesdays. That doesn't necessarily mean that I clean them every single Tuesday, but it means that when Tuesday comes around, I say it's bathroom cleaning day because it's Tuesday. Oh, I didn't clean them last Tuesday because last Tuesday I had to go help my mother in law. Yeah, that means it's been two weeks. I need to make sure that I clean them today and I get them over with. But then the week before when I went to see my mother in law, I don't have that nagging guilt of, oh my goodness, I didn't clean bathrooms. I haven't cleaned them in forever. When am I going to get to those? I know that I'm going to get to them next Tuesday. Okay, so it's just a way for me to combat what I call T pad time passage awareness disorder to help me stay on track and make sure that I get the major things done and that I have a concept of how long it's been since I did it last. So that's where I am. This week I did bathroom cleaning again. And I'm going to tell you what, bathroom cleaning is a whole lot easier when you did it. A week ago I had put it off many Tuesdays in the summer. And so it was a lot of work that first Tuesday back, but the second Tuesday back was so much less work. And I'm working in my shower, cleaning my shower because it was pretty bad. And so I'm just cleaning it every Tuesday. I'm not making it absolutely perfect every Tuesday, I'm just cleaning it a little bit more, which is one of the things with natural cleaning products. I know a lot of times it can be paralyzing when you start thinking about the chemicals that are in cleaning products. If you want to go a more natural route, which one of the things I've been doing with my shower is I just use a non scratch scrubby sponge with dish soap and I use that to clean my shower. Well, you know, it's probably not going to work as quickly as some of your, you know, high chemical type cleaning products. But if I will just work on it every week, then over the course of a few weeks, then I get farther and farther through that grime that built up over time. So natural cleaning products, really the key to using those is consistency, being consistent and realizing, okay, it may not be perfect this week, but if I will come back to it next week, not next month, and go back over it with the natural cleaning products, then I'm going to make that much more progress. And over time it really does make a huge difference. So. So that is basically where I am this week. I discovered something I always had heard my mother say that she cleaned the shower while she was in it, which just never made that much sense to me. I never really thought about it. I was like, huh, what? And I think part of that is because by the time I was old enough to care about a shower cleaning routine, my shower was already so dirty that I thought I had to have the major chemicals. And so I didn't. You know, that just kind of grossed me out to think about taking a shower and having all those chemicals in there with me, whatever. But now that I'm using the, you know, scrubby sponge and the dishwashing liquid, which is what my mom, my grandmother used to use to give me a bubble bath. She had me just use Ivory soap. But since I'm using that anyway to clean my shower, I thought, oh, that is what makes sense now. I get it. I can do that while I'm cleaning my shower. And I've actually worked on my shower other days this week. You know, when I had a little bit of extra time in the shower, I thought, hey, I'm just gonna, you know, scrub a little bit more here. And it's amazing how that works, because one of my biggest excuses. Seriously, I am the best at excuses. Is that I hate getting my clothes wet while I'm cleaning the shower. And basically, to clean the shower, you have to climb in it. Well, you know what? If you clean the shower while you're taking a shower, you don't have to worry about getting your clothes wet because you're not wearing any. All right? So anyway, that's one of my big light bulb moments that I've had this week. Let's see, then. I promised you that I would give you one decluttering tip that you can apply in your house today. Last week, we talked about the visibility rule and that need to, you know, focus on the things that you can see so that you'll see visible progress, and that will inspire you to keep going. But the truth is, there are often times where you don't know where to start. This was me in my entire house. Now, I think most people in the world have a junk drawer or a room of their house that just paralyzes them. They open up the door, look inside, and close the door back up and say, I can't do this. I can't do this. It's too much. I don't even know where to start. Well, I had my entire house that way, basically. And so I had to learn how to push through that feeling of. Of just complete, completely being overwhelmed. My rule for knowing where to start is do the easy stuff first. Okay? What that means is when I look. Let's say I look at my laundry room, and my laundry room is a complete disaster, and it just completely overwhelms me if I look in there and I go, okay, I need to do the easy stuff first. The easy stuff is the stuff that has a place somewhere other than in this space. Okay? Like, for us, maybe it's a ladder that I look in the laundry room, and I see a ladder, and I think, okay, the ladder is not even supposed to be in the laundry room. It's supposed to be in the garage. That's its home. And so I take the ladder out of the laundry room and I take it to the garage right then. And that was not a decision for me to make. It was just something that already had a home, but it was in the wrong place. And once that is gone, then there's one less huge thing in the laundry room, and suddenly the laundry room looks a little bit better. So I go to the next Thing that's really obvious. Maybe it's, I don't know, empty laundry detergent containers on top of the dryer. And I see those and I think, okay, those are empty, I don't need them anymore. So I go get rid of those. We're not going to worry about why they were there. I just go get rid of them and suddenly the top of my dryer is, you know, significantly more clear. And visually I can look into that room and it's no longer as overwhelming as it was when I started. So that helps me break through that moment of just completely complete paralyzation where I just, I can't even get started. So that's my, that's my advice is do the easy stuff first. Figure out what that means for you. Look in the room and instead of worrying about, oh, what am I going to do with all this stuff, just focusing on something in the room that has a home, that actually has a place somewhere else. Don't worry about the stuff that don't, the things that don't have a home. Worry about that one item that, you know it has a place somewhere else. Pick it up, go take it there. Maybe it's a toy in the laundry basket, you know, go take it to your kids room, whatever, just get it out of there so that visually it's no longer as overwhelming as it used to be. Okay, so that was podcast number two. Thank you for listening so much. I appreciate you being here. I just wanted to remind you again that in this month of September we do, I am having a sale on all of my ebooks. I am also on Thursday mornings at 10 o' clock for the month of September and possibly after that, but specifically in the month of September, I'm discussing the four habits in 28 days to hope for your home. So if you're working your way through that book, through that ebook, trying to get your house on track, that's a great place for you to come. They are recorded, so if you miss it, it's no big deal, you can go watch it later. But that's a hangout on Google where I can have interaction with other people and you can ask questions that you have about the habit, how it's working in your house, how it's not working in your house. And like I said, don't forget that those books ebooks are on sale 28 days to hope for your home. And Drowning and clutter are both on sale for $3 using the code HABIT. And you can get the two ebook set for $5 with that same code. Go to a slob comes clean.com connect to find me everywhere, all over the Internet. I'd love to connect with you on Facebook, facebook.com aslobcomes clean. And I will. And also go to find the show notes for this podcast at a slob comes clean.com podcasts. And this is show number two, September of 2013. All right, thank you. Bye bye.