← podcasts Archives - Dana K. White: A Slob Comes Clean
podcasts Archives - Dana K. White: A Slob Comes Clean
510: Back to the Basics! (So What Exactly are the Basics?)
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Welcome to A Slob Comes Clean, the Podcast. I am Dana K. White. I share my personal deslobification process as I figure out ways to keep my own home under control. I share the truth about cleaning and organizing strategies that actually work in real life for real people. People who don't love cleaning and organizing. Thanks for joining me today. This is podcast number 510, which just feels like a really big number. But this title for this week I think is going to be what Exactly Are the Basics? Or maybe something like Back to Basics, but what Exactly Are the Basics? So it is may as I'm recording this and may as you're going to hear it if you're hearing in real time. And that means summer's coming. A little bit about me in case this is your first year around here, you may not know that I actually technically take summers off. It's a little different now because my kids are college aged and I do record all, or at least almost all of my YouTube videos during the summer, which is not really taking the summer off. And I do have book contracts that I have to, you know, randomly something comes in and I have to get something done for that. But as a rule I don't put out new content in the summer. I don't put out videos, I don't put out blog posts. Not that I write those that much anymore anyway, but. And I don't put out podcasts in the summer. Never fear. Last summer we started something which a lot of you responded really well to, said you really loved, which is we will be publishing what have been previously recorded as live Q&As on YouTube here on the podcast. So you actually will have things podcasts coming through your podcast feed wherever you subscribe right now, but they're going to be not new content. Okay. Anyway, I say all that because I like to warn people just so you know that that's coming and to let you know there's a reason why I do that and it's called my sanity. This episode is brought to you by Pura. When you want to freshen your home, you don't have to limit your favorite SC to just one room. With Pura, you can build a whole home scenting system that follows you throughout your day. Put a Pura home in your bedroom. Enjoy your favorite fragrance in your living room with Pura Home Plus. And a Pura Home Mini in the bathroom would be awesome and helpful and you can control them all seamlessly from the app. Pura is the smart home fragrance brand redefining how people scent their spaces. I love citrus scents, so the Citrus Surf set sounds perfect. I've loved all the scents that Pura has sent me and I especially love that Pura's app Controlled Diffusers deliver a completely customizable scenting experience. You can control intensity levels and scent schedules. One home, one connected fragrance experience. Visit pura.com whole home to get started. Learn more@pura.com I started taking summers off when my kids were so I started the blog, you know about the anonymous blog about getting my house under control in 2009. I did not take the first summer off. I might have still worked, tried to work the second summer, but what I found was it was really hard. It was really hard. And I and I'm saying this knowing that a lot of you listening homeschool and blah, blah, okay. But I'm just speaking from my own experience of trying to do this business that I was trying to build at the same time as really trying to soak up every second of the summer and also the out of the routineness of the summer. And I just decided I was not going to do this business that I had made up out of thin air in the summers. And it is one of my what's the opposite of regret? Like most things I'm most grateful I chose to do, did it stunt my business? Absolutely. Would I maybe have had opportunities that I haven't had because I took, you know, three months of not, you know, three months of the year off, basically, I'm sure, yes. But at the same time, whatever I don't have because I did that I'm absolutely fine with because of what I do have, which is it gets me through. I really think one of the reasons why I'm still doing this 17 years later is that I know summer is coming and summer gives me the energy and excitement to get going again when mid August comes around. Anyway, that's a lot about me, but it's one of those things that I have decided that's really made a difference. But my point is summer is coming. Summer is out of the routine, even for those who don't have lives based around a school year calendar. I mean, my kids are young adults. They're all in college at this point, so we are kind of based around that. I've got two of them are coming home for the summer. My husband works in education, so he has a different kind of a schedule in the summer. I, I personally am probably always going to live this way just because, you know, of my husband's job. Although, who knows who knows? But even for those of you who don't have any relationship with a school calendar, you know that this loosey goosey time happens, because I know at our church, you know, we have different things going on. It's. It's not just the normal, you know, Bible studies that run, they often run on the school year calendar or whatever. It's just a lot of the normal things that you do are different because it's summertime. So that can feel extremely daunting, especially for those of us who have finally started. Started to make some progress. I mean, that my first summer, if you go back and read from the beginning of the blog, which I know so many of you have done, which if you ever want to do that, go to aslobcomesclean.com and then click where it says get started and it'll tell you how to do that. But you can go back to just see the real time transformation, the real time transformation of my home, of my thinking. It's recorded every day there for the first, like four to five years of this process. I recorded every day. This is what I'm doing. This is what's running through my brain as I'm doing it. This is the reason I'm resisting it all that anyway. But if you go back to that first summer, I was scared to death. I. What I mean, that's a dramatic way to say it, but I was scared of losing the progress that I had made. I was finally seeing a difference in my home. And that happened because In August of 2009, I started doing my dishes every day. And then I started adding other tasks that were daily maintenance tasks that I used to think, well, what's the point of doing that when my house is a disaster? I should get my house totally clean first and then do those things right? But I was seeing it. I was experiencing laundry that was under control. I think I had it under control by then, even though that took a lot longer than most things for me. I had my kitchen under control. I had a basic, you know, routine of keeping the bathrooms clean and keeping the floor. You know, I was doing pickups. My house was so different in May than it had been when I started in August. And it was not perfect. It was far from perfect. I was decluttering actively, but I was not done decluttering or anywhere near done decluttering. Still not done decluttering because there's no such thing as being done with decluttering, but you know what I mean? So I had made so much progress, and then my Routine that I had established was about to change with summer. And I was so scared that it was all going to go out the window because out of the routine times are hard, period. So I know that feeling. If you have finally started to make some progress and maybe you're listening to this at some time, that's not summer, or maybe summer has no effect on you, but you know what it's like when you go, oh, I've been doing so well and now something's about to change. Something is about to be different. My schedule, my routine, whatever, my responsibilities are going to be different. And I'm nervous that everything I've done so far is going to fall away. Okay? So that's why I thought, let's talk about Back to Basics. So this week I'm going to talk about Back to Basics. Next week is gonna be my last new content podcast. That will come out until August, but you'll still get podcasts in your feed of the live Q and A's that from. From past the past year. But next week we'll talk about the five step decluttering process. Okay, so I'm gonna kind of give you a little heads up on that. But for this week, I just wanna talk about the Back to Basics because it's important to think about what is it that has actually changed in my home? And what do I now know is the nittiest of the grittiest that needs to be done to keep it from going back out of control? That was the key. Any time that I had tried to change before, which had been a million bajillion times, so many times I would get going, I would maybe do really well for a while. Life would happen, something would change in my routine, my energy, my responsibilities, whatever, and it would get out of control again. And I would think, oh, that didn't work. I need to come up with a new way of doing things. Whatever it was that I was doing for that two weeks or that couple of months that things were actually starting to improve, now that that failed, that means whatever I was doing, why would I even think about that again? I'm not going to go back to doing that because clearly it didn't work. Because here we are back in this situation. Okay? What I learned by what I call my de slopification process, really paying attention to what moved the needle to the nittiest of the grittiest. What I learned was it was always about those small things. A big plan was never the thing that changed my home. What changed my home was doing the dishes. What changed? My home was doing pickups. What changed? My home was getting my laundry under control. And what changed? My home was decluttering getting stuff out so that it could never get out of control again. Not that the house couldn't get out of control, but that particular item, as long as it was gone, could not contribute to a house being out of control ever again. Okay, so let's talk about the basics so that in that moment, as things start to feel a little bit like, oh no, I feel like I'm getting out of control, what do you zero in on? What do you focus in on to say? I'm not going to throw everything out that I have learned and accomplished in my home. Instead, I'm going to zero in on out of all these things that I've been doing well, when the time comes that I cannot do all of those things really well or oops, I haven't done those things really well for several days without even realizing I wasn't doing them. What is it that I need to do? It's a real problem that teens are spending so much time on their phones and on social media that it's affecting their mental health. But the good news is that there is a solution that Gab has addressed the problem by doing something that no one else is doing. Their approach is called Tech in Steps. With Gab's Tech in Steps approach, kids get the right tech at the right time. From watches with GPS tracking to the perfect first phone with no Internet or social media to the teen phone with parent approved apps. It was stressful when our kids got their first phones. It was a lot of work to monitor them and keep them safe. Honestly, I wished we had a phone exactly like Gab that would only have the basics until they were ready for a little bit more. Bottom you don't have to give your kid a device that was intended for adults. Gab is a great option for them to stay socially connected. Without social media. Gab might be just the solution for your family. And right now, use our code to get the best deal on a kid's phone that will make parenting easier and give you more peace of mind. Visit gab.com slob and use code slob for an exclusive offer. That's gab g a b g be this episode is sponsored by Better Health. Life is a journey full of ups and downs. Some days are good, others feel overwhelming. It can feel like you have to figure it all out on your own. But May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the truth is no one has all of the answers. Having someone who will listen, understand and support you can make all the difference. At Better Help, you'll find therapists who work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US they match you with a therapist using a short questionnaire identifying your needs and preferences. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time. Working with my Better Health therapist was incredibly helpful. She helped me shift my perspective and gave me real strategies to work through some pretty daunting challenges. You don't have to be on this journey alone. Find support and have someone with you in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com Clean that's betterhelp.com Clean this episode is brought to you by Pura. When you want to freshen your home, you don't have to limit your favorite scent to just one room. With Pura, you can build a whole home scenting system that follows you throughout your day. Put a Pura home in your bedroom. Enjoy your favorite fragrance in your living room with Pura Home plus and a Pura Home mini in the bathroom would be awesome and helpful. And you can can control them all seamlessly from the app. Pura is the smart home fragrance brand redefining how people scent their spaces. I love citrus scents, so the Citrus surf set sounds perfect. I've loved all the scents that Pura has sent me and I especially love that Pur's app Controlled Diffusers deliver a completely customizable scenting experience. You can control intensity levels and scent schedules. One home, one connected fragrance experience. Visit pura.com whole home to get started. Learn more@pura.com okay, so we're going to talk about the basics in my book how to manage your home without losing your mind. At the end of that book is my what what was originally the very first guide I ever wrote and it's called 28 Days to Hope for your home. And that was an ebook that I used to sell years ago. And when I wrote how to manage your home without losing your mind, I said I I need to include this in the book because it's kind of perfect. I mean it's the 28 day guide to getting started. I don't want to just talk about how to get started. I want to give them this actual guide. And so we put it in that book. If you have that book, it's at the end, it's the appendix. If you have the audiobook that you've purchased somewhere you can actually now finally it Took a long time for this to happen. But with like, if you're listening to it on audible, if you own it on audible, if you go in to the information about that book, you'll see where it says a PDF and like, it's an attachment and you can actually see that get that PDF that way. Not if you're getting it from the library, unfortunately. But if you own the book somewhere, you should have that. If for some reason you can't find it, just email us danaslab. Or actually email teamslabcomesclean.com and that way you'll maybe get an answer this summer. Anyway, this 28 day guide is four basic habits that build over the course of four weeks. And it's a little bit like, really, is that all? I'm going to focus on the first week? Because so many times when you're like, I'm going to change my home, you know what? This is it. I'm going to change my home. I have decided I'm going to change my home. That energy makes us feel like we need to start big. Starting big is great as long as we are doing it in a way that is going to move us forward on the things that have to be moved forward, which is the dishes. Okay, so. But what's better is to really zero in on doing what I can, but also knowing the thing that has to be done. And so those first four weeks, they go like this. For seven days you do the dishes. And over the course of the first seven days of that 28 days to hope for your home, I go through the thoughts that you're gonna have and the emotions you're gonna have and the reasons why you're not gonna wanna do the dishes again on the second day after it took you seven hours to get them done on the first day. But I also talk about why you need to go ahead and do them on the second day. And on the second day, the reason you need to do them is now you actually see what one day's worth of dishes and actually is where if you've always been behind, if you've always put off doing the dishes for several days at a time, you don't have any concept of what one day's worth of dishes are. Okay, that's dishes math. One day's worth of dishes takes 15 to 20 minutes. Two days takes an hour, not just double the amount of time. Three days takes hours. So really zeroing in on that for the first seven days of the 28 days. And on the third day and fourth day we talk about, like, the temptations to sleep. Skip all the reasons why this, you know, why we tend to go, oh, I don't actually have to do them today. Or the reasons we. Anyway. And then you move on through three other habits. Three other habits are checking the bathrooms for clutter. When I say checking the bathrooms for clutter, I think that's actually week three. But checking the bathrooms for clutter, what I mean by that is literally going in and dealing with stuff that's out of place. I'm not even saying to wipe down the sink or wipe down the cabinets or do a quick, you know, scrub of the toilet. I know that those things would be great, but I was trying to build from absolute overwhelm, absolute overwhelm to the point of being paralyzed and just feeling like, I don't get this. I don't understand. And so I was going as small as I could. And there is a lot of value in making one of those tasks. Check the bathrooms for clutter. What that means is you walk in and you see, oh, there's the, you know, cloth that I used to wash my face last night, and I just randomly set it down. Okay, that's actually going to go into the laundry now. Oh, there's the empty deodorant container next to the one that I just got out of, the new deodorant. All right, well, I'm going to throw away the empty one. Oh, there's random clothes on the floor. I'm going to pick those up and I'm going to put them in the hamper or wherever it is that we put our dirty clothes. So it feels like it's not enough. But as a daily habit, I cannot tell you how highly effective it is to check the bathrooms for clutter. It means that when somebody is coming over, you can do a quick wipe of things, and that's all you have to do to let people in. It means, well, unless it's like, super, super messy. But you know what I mean? If it's. When you go to clean the bathrooms, which was one of the things I used to dread and put off and put off. If I go to clean the bathrooms and there's nothing to do first, I can just clean the bathrooms because the only things on the counter are things that actually should be there and they are neatly, you know, put on there, and they're not just spread out everywhere. When there's not a bunch of stuff that I have to pick up off the floor first, all of that is already done. So that when I'M like, I'm going to clean the bathroom. All I have to do is clean the bathroom. It's really shocking. That powerful impact of that smallest as it can possibly be daily habit. Okay, but again, that was week three. So week two, I should go back. Week two on my 28 Days to Hope for your home is sweeping the kitchen. Sweeping the kitchen is not actually about the crumbs. It is about having a mindset, a habit, a task, really, because it's not like a habit like, oh, I didn't realize I just swept the kitchen. That never happens for me. But this mindset of saying, okay, I'm going to sweep the kitchen, which then helps me go, oh, these shoes have been strewn across the kitchen. There's four pairs of shoes, whatever, okay? Those need to be dealt with. Oh, here's the. I think when I first wrote that, probably it says something about newspapers on the floor next to the breakfast table. And that's a little different now, which is kind of crazy how much times have changed, right? I mean, sometimes I'm sure there's lots of people who still get newspapers, but, you know, it's just different. It's different than it used to be. So anyway. But that. Or the groceries that I brought in and put away the cold stuff, and then I left the bags with the canned goods or, you know, cereal boxes or whatever just sitting on the floor because I'm like, well, I don't have to do that right now, so I'm not going to, you know, so that sweeping the kitchen is a habit that when I did my dishes every day and I did the sweeping the kitchen every day, all of a sudden my kitchen looks pretty much fine, pretty much all the time. Now, I know sometimes people will say things like, do you really just mean sweep the. I mean, do you really just mean do the dishes? Don't you mean wipe down the counters? And I'm like, actually, I just mean do the dishes. Wiping down the counters is often a natural result of having the dishes done. You just kind of do that. But even if you don't do that by doing the dishes every day, you don't end up with a backlog of dishes. So that when you go to clean the kitchen, you're so much less overwhelmed, which means you're more willing to do it regularly, like, every day, okay? Because the dish is already done. So having that zeroed in, this is the barest of bare minimums, is to do the dishes every day. Okay? If I can add one thing to that, I can add one thing. To that. But that's the barest of bare minimums.
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So those are the things. The fourth week of the 28 Days to Hope for your Home is the five minute pickup. Now I just want to say if you're like, okay, four things. Okay, I'm going to do these four things every day. I know the tendency is for you to hear them on this podcast and for you to go, okay, then I'm going to start doing these four things all today. I'm going to say do the dishes. And then I'm actually going to say now that if you're giving it 28 days and you can do all four of those habits, you do it. But if you're like, I am just so overwhelmed I can't even think about a 28 day guide and what? And oh, I just need to know the two things to do dishes and a five minute pickup. If you can only do one, do the dishes. If you can do one other thing than the dishes, do the five minute pickup. Because those are the two basics that will either change your home or maintain your home. They will change your home and then maintain your home. Those two tasks are not magical because there's no wand to be waived. They are quite literally, I mean, there's no wand. You have to do the work. I mean they just it's work that has to be done. But those two tasks, even if your house is an actual waist high, you only have paths walking through to get to where you need to get. If you will zero in on if I can only do one thing, I'm going to do the dishes. And every day say I am down to the absolute basics If I can only do one thing, I'm going to do the dishes. If you will focus on the dishes, it will positively affect the entire home. And then you add to that if you have time, which is gonna be different than it is today, if you haven't done the dishes in a long time and you do the dishes today, don't worry about doing the five minute pickup today. Just focus on getting the dishes done and then do the dishes again tomorrow. And if that's all you do, great. But if you happen to be like, okay, I kind of wanna do something else, do the five minute pickup. Because the five minute pickup is shockingly powerful. Hear me clearly. I am not saying that if your house is waist high with paths from space to space that you need to go, that five minutes is all you need. That's not what I'm saying at all. Because I used to hear things like, oh, five minutes. And I was like, what difference would five minutes make? Because five minutes was not going to finish anything. But a five minute pickup is always valuable. Every time. If you're in the waist high situation or if you're just in the. It's a disaster. And I'm, this is, I can't do this and this is too much. Whatever that looks like for you. If you're in that situation or if you're in a situation where you're like, I've kind of got things under control. Oh, I'm nervous about it getting out of control during the out of the routine time and I kind of got things out of control or, oh, I've made a lot of progress, but I still have a long way to go. The five minute pickup is for every single one of those situations and is always going to be positive. If you're in the situation where you have the disastrous spaces you probably have, I'm just gonna guess you probably have some shopping bags somewhere. You probably do. Even if you've started using reusable bags now, you probably have a stash of shopping bags or maybe gift bags that have something has spilled on them or whatever, you know, like, grab whatever you got, trash bag if you need to and throw away trash for five minutes. If you are not in that type of a situation, throw away trash. And then when you feel like, oh, okay, I've gotten most of the trash that I can see, pick things up and put them all the way away for five minutes. I do not mean to get done what you think someone else would be able to get done in five minutes or have these like, okay, I think this is what I would qualify as five minutes worth of work. It might take me two hours. That's not what we're talking about. I'm talking about setting your actual timer on your phone. Most of you are probably listening to this on your phone right now. Set the timer for five minutes and however overwhelmed you feel, pick up something that isn't in the right place and go put it in the right place. In the beginning, that's going to be trash going in the trash, over the recycling and stuff that you do know where it goes. If you've got a lot, okay, so, so go through that process of just picking stuff up and putting it away, not picking it up and sitting in a pile of things to put away. At the end of five minutes, we're not sorting for five minutes. With my no mess decluttering process, we're never sorting things into piles. That's just not, that's not beneficial for people like me. But for that five minutes, even if it's only going to be three things that go to their home, it's going to be worth your time. It's a great way for you to get started. If you're completely overwhelmed, it is the way to maintain. So whatever decluttering progress you have made in maybe a time period where you were really able to focus, there was such and such situation of work was going this way, whatever. And so I decided I'm just going to, you know, I'm really getting a ton done on decluttering. Oh, no. Something's about to change. This routine that I've been enjoying that I've kind of been like, oh, I've been able to declutter every Saturday or I've been able to, you know, do a little bit every night for whatever amount of time. We all know that life doesn't just keep going the same way forever. So something's going to change at some point. Whatever progress that you've made doing a five minute pickup every day, or almost every day or five times a day if you feel like it, doing a five minute pickup is going to maintain the progress that you have made. Let's say that you worked and worked and worked. Now you've got, you know, kids home all day, plus a couple college kids home, plus people coming to visit, plus whatever. Just, you know, things are out of the routine. If you do a five minute pickup every day from middle of May to middle of August, you're going to be shocked and amazed at how it doesn't get back out of control. I know, I know. It can feel like what? Try it, test it, give it a shot to figure out does this work? Because it does. The five minute pickup is so crucial to both the beginning because it's a non overwhelming amount of time. It's a very low commitment level. I don't have to understand, I don't have to predict, I don't have to have a big plan. I'm just going to set a timer for five minutes and throw away what I know to throw away and put away what I know to put away. And I'm not expecting to be finished. I'm not expecting to have a perfect space because it's only five minutes. So that's a very low energy, low commitment, easy way to get started. But it's also the thing that's going to maintain what progress you have made. So we have doing the dishes and five minute pickup and then if you can sweep the kitchen and then if you can check the bathrooms for clutter, those things are going to have a huge impact on your home. Those are the four things that I put in 28 days to hope for your home. Because those are the things that I figured out by digging my own way out of a total disastrous house that had been a disaster for years. Those are the four things that I could not believe the impact they had on my house. The basics are how you change your home. I know you may have clutter. I know that you may not have, you know, you may not have been caught up on laundry in the last seven years. I know that your kitchen may be an embarrassing mess. You haven't been able to cook in, in a long time. Like, I get it. I know that there are big things that need to happen. I know it feels like I need to hire a service. I need somebody to come in. I need somebody to come in and do this for me because I just can't do it. I had all those same feelings. The thing that made the difference was doing the dishes every day. The thing that really changed my house was doing a five minute pickup, checking the bathrooms for clutter, sweeping the kitchen, those. It honestly shocked me, the impact of the basics on my home. I get it. It feels like those are maintenance tasks. Why would I do maintenance tasks when I don't want to maintain this? This is not what I want. So the idea of maintaining made no sense to me. But in reality, those are maintenance tasks because they're the things that if I, if I don't do them consistently, then I can't do all the other things. And so getting them Done to the point where they're no longer overwhelming to do because I'm doing them consistently. Once I'm at that point, then I was able to actually make progress in my home because I wasn't always having to go back and make up for what I hadn't done yet. Okay, back to the basics. Focus on the basics. When you start to feel things getting loosey goosey, when you start to feel that little panic in your chest that any progress that you're making is maybe going to be undone or go backwards or whatever, focus on the basics. Back to the basics. But what exactly are the basics? The basics are dishes and a five minute pickup. And there's so much relief knowing that anytime you start to feel like, oh no, it's happening again, oh no, here we go. I wasn't paying any attention because I was focused on getting ready for vacation or coming back from vacation or having fun, doing some out of the routine thing. And all of a sudden I'm like, I look up one day and my house looks like it's back out of control. First of all, it's not. If you've been decluttering, it's not where it was before. It can feel like it, it can even look like it. But when you have that panicky feeling, go do the dishes. You know exactly what to do. Go do the dishes. Do a five minute pickup. What you're gonna find is that a lot of stuff that you're seeing now that you're like, oh, no, it's back to what it was before. That is actually easy stuff and trash for you to be able to get out. Okay, I hope that was helpful. And next week I will go back over my five step decluttering process just so you'll have it. Just so you'll have it for the summer. Okay, I'll talk to y' all later. Bye.