10-minute Increments of Everything
Our apartment is always grubby. Neither Cook nor I seem to have the natural interest/aptitude or the training for decent house-keeping. (We also seem to have more or less no taste - not really bad taste, I don't think, but no taste at all - we have no knack for interior decoration.) I would like to improve myself in this, so I've signed up for housekeeping prompts from a really weird website. I'm not going to cite it, even, because it's kind of embarrassing, and eerily cultlike. The tips for taking control of your life and home include things like "shine your sink - it'll make you smile!" (the very first thing you should do to take control of your life, apparently) and "get up 15 minutes before the rest of your household so you can get dressed and get your face and hair ready." But I'm kind of excited about some of it (so far as anyone can GET excited about housekeeping tips, which isn't very far), and most of all I like the advice that "you can do anything for 15 minutes." I don't think that's quite true, and I prefer not to test it to extremes (can I REALLY hold my breath for 15 minutes?), but I' ve cut it down to 10 for application in my own lazy life. So now I set the timer twice a day for 10 minutes. I battle the Vast Encroaching Clutter for one 10-minute session, and I do something else cleaningish for 10 minutes. The creepy website emails me "missions" to do every day, and sometimes I do those, or something else that seems more relevant to my life. Today I wiped all the cabinet and drawer fronts in the kitchen. Yesterday I dusted part of the livingroom.
Next, I shall conquer the world!
Keeping house is so hard! Even to my slovenly standards, it's hard. I also can't imagine keeping house in a HOUSE. If keeping an apartment you only live in for a few years seems horribly daunting, keeping a house that you live in for decades seems impossible. I'd have to do things like wash the ceiling! We did finally clean the walls in the bathroom of our current apartment (which was not... exactly... clean when we moved in), but only because I'd made the mistake of wiping a particularly icky spot, creating a small, irregularly shaped, radiantly white area surrounded by dark grey. Then we had to carry on and clean the walls of the whole damn room, because it was obvious that the walls were coated in a thick layer of grime. We decided not to brighten the painfully dim lighting in the bathroom, in the interest of shadowing all the other housekeeping deficiencies in that room, but the disgusting-wall problem was evident even in near-darkness.
Anyway, I don't know how people keep their homes clean, be they studio apartments or giant mansions. Presumably those people spend time actually cleaning, rather than complaining about cleaning.
(Also, in the interest of appeasing my parents, who actually read this, I have to make clear that I was raised properly, in a clean house. And Cook was raised properly in a VERY clean house. So it's not your fault, parents!)
Next, I shall conquer the world!
Keeping house is so hard! Even to my slovenly standards, it's hard. I also can't imagine keeping house in a HOUSE. If keeping an apartment you only live in for a few years seems horribly daunting, keeping a house that you live in for decades seems impossible. I'd have to do things like wash the ceiling! We did finally clean the walls in the bathroom of our current apartment (which was not... exactly... clean when we moved in), but only because I'd made the mistake of wiping a particularly icky spot, creating a small, irregularly shaped, radiantly white area surrounded by dark grey. Then we had to carry on and clean the walls of the whole damn room, because it was obvious that the walls were coated in a thick layer of grime. We decided not to brighten the painfully dim lighting in the bathroom, in the interest of shadowing all the other housekeeping deficiencies in that room, but the disgusting-wall problem was evident even in near-darkness.
Anyway, I don't know how people keep their homes clean, be they studio apartments or giant mansions. Presumably those people spend time actually cleaning, rather than complaining about cleaning.
(Also, in the interest of appeasing my parents, who actually read this, I have to make clear that I was raised properly, in a clean house. And Cook was raised properly in a VERY clean house. So it's not your fault, parents!)
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In the meantime, I think the 10-minute rule is a good one. I often use it to get myself started (works for doing homework and writing papers too!).