“This is BRAND NEW information!!”

So when Tom and I first got married, we obviously didn't want to pay for cable, right? So we had a DVD player and we had the whole box set of Friends and we watched those DVDs over and over again. And one of my favorite episodes was when Phoebe and Joey find out that Rachel is pregnant. And they already knew it, but Ross comes in and tells them that Rachel is pregnant. And they overreact and then he says: With my son. And Phoebe says: This is

brand

new

information

. And it's funny because they already knew it, right?

And Ross says: You know. But I think the good thing about

this

is that

this

is often what happens to us when decluttering. We set aside a huge chunk of time, a Saturday, a vacation, something we're going to seriously declutter and that's it. And what happens? Something kidnaps him. Someone gets sick, the pet gets sick, we get sick, something else comes up or, if we have the chance to have that time and can tidy up, we get distracted by something else, we lose strength, we get overwhelmed. with decision fatigue. And at the end of the weekend, we look back and say, why does this always happen?

He always gets kidnapped, right? And we act like it's new

information

, but the problem is, it's not new information, right? If you're busy, if you don't have a lot of time, that's how it usually goes. That's why today I want to talk about how we can continue organizing our house if we don't have much time. Today I'm going to talk about time, but you can also exchange energy with that. If you don't have much time or if you have energy limitations, how can we organize our house? Let's talk about it today. Well hello, I'm Dawn from The Minimal Mom and I love sharing tips and tricks to help you simplify your home so you can regain your sanity and enjoy life again.

So you can enjoy time with your children or have the space to dedicate yourself to the things that really matter to you. We've been living as minimalists for about seven years and it's amazing. It keeps getting better and better, so I want to share it with you too. But I do know that time and energy constraints are real, but what's so funny is that it's like a chicken and egg. Because if you're super busy, you especially need a streamlined home, right? You just need it to run smoothly on autopilot and not have to stress about everything around you.

And that's why it's difficult because if you're busy, you don't have time to tidy up, but it's what you need most. And okay, so I'm going to channel my, I just, sometimes I feel like I need a whiteboard, right? So let's start here from the top and state our problem. There is no time. And like I said, I'm going to use this interchangeably with power. So there is no time. This is usually when I also realize that if I actually combed the back of my hair today, I think I pretty much did it. Oh, it's fine.

Well. There is no time. So if we don't have time, what do we need? What we need is a house that is disaster-proof. So what I mean by this is that there is no way our house can get to a point where it takes several days to recover. So if I don't have a lot of time or energy, I need my house to be very easy to maintain so that even if we go a couple of days without decluttering, picking up and cleaning, there will be stuff everywhere, I know in the back of my mind , it actually won't take that long to put it back together.

It may seem like a disaster, right? But it's disaster-proof in the sense that it won't take long to put it back together. And how we get there is through low inventory. And that's why we talk about inventory all the time, right? How much do I want to manage personally? So the way we're going to talk about inventory today is in relation to disaster-proofing our home. So what do I mean? If children take out all their toys, how long does it take them to pick them up again? So we show it when our... Our kids are really running out of toys and it's so sad.

Very sad. But you've shown our toy bins before, right? So let's say the kids knock over all the toy bins and they're everywhere. Well, how long does it really take to get it back? It actually doesn't take that long because there really aren't that many toys. It will seem like if you walk into the room and it's all over, it will still look like a mess. It will look like a big mess. Like Tom still comes home and says, what's going on here? Start collecting. But when I look at that, I know it's going to take, I don't know, five minutes to clean up.

Ten if I force them to do it alone, like five if I help or Tom collaborates. In the past, when I looked at the whole toy room or family room that had all the toys lined up on the walls, I knew I could put them in toy boxes and stuff, and push it all up against the wall, but it wasn't clean. It was not ordered. It wasn't, it didn't feel good. And in reality it would have taken them hours to organize and organize their toys and make them look presentable again. So this is what I'm talking about.

The way to disaster-proof your home is by limiting inventory. So even if they took out everything in my house, it wouldn't take long to put the house back in order, to get it to a place where everything was tidy, someone could come and not think. They had robbed us. And again, my goal wasn't for people to be able to walk by in an ad. It was for me, it was so that we could live somewhere peaceful and I could regain some of my own sanity and mental space. But I liked the idea of ​​could someone stop by as a barometer to see how clean or tidy the house is?

Again, I wanted to get to this disaster-proof point where it doesn't matter, you can take every single thing out of every closet, drawer, cabinet, whatever, and it won't take long to put it back together. . And this is still our home now. I mean, there are days when you could walk into our house and say, there's a big mess in here, because no one has tidied or picked up all day and it would be like, wow! But what's so amazing is that in 15 minutes, everything is put away and someone could walk in and say, Oh wow, your house is so nice and tidy, right?

Again, not my goal, but my barometer of how disaster-proof my home is. Again, when I didn't have time, this was my goal: to make my house disaster-proof. And I realized that the best way to get there was to be low on inventory. So the question arises: how do we get to a point of low inventory if we don't have time? I understand this, Dawn. I'm following with you. I have seen your videos. I understand this concept of inventory and I don't want to have so much to manage, but I don't have time to declutter or simplify.

Then what do I do? I'm so glad you asked. So, as I said at the beginning, we often glamorize these large periods of time. All this Saturday, this week of vacation, the time is approaching when I am going to dig in and declutter my entire house or a large part of it. But what's the problem with that? We suffer from decision fatigue. It's a real thing. Or we wake up that morning and I don't feel like it, the sun isn't shining, it's a little rainy, I don't feel like tidying up today. If we're putting all our eggs in that basket of those big cleaning sessions, and then something comes up that makes it impossible, whether it's something out of my control or just my own attitude for that day, then it's over and now Here I have to go another week, two or three weeks before I have this huge amount of time again.

And I love this James Clear quote because I think it fits perfectly. He says, "It's very easy to overestimate the importance of a defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements daily." Again, this idea that I'm going to have big cleaning sessions and this is how I'm going to declutter my house. But what really creates change are these small daily improvements. But they're not glamorous, are they? And let's face it, for most of us we know how difficult it is to start a new habit. So now I feel like I'm stuck in a difficult situation again.

And now I have to figure out how I can get into the daily habit of tidying up. So what I would challenge you is to try to find five minutes each day to declutter. But here's what we need to keep in mind when we do this. Five minutes won't make much of a difference. When I look at how much I order in five minutes, it's not much. So it's very easy to dismiss it and say, yes, I understand what you mean by this, but you should really see my house. But here's the thing: When we commit to doing five minutes, it's not about things leaving our house.

It's really about the mindset. I'm going to draw a brain, more or less. It's actually about developing the mindset. I recently had the opportunity to play Mins Game with my Facebook decluttering group. I've never actually done it before, but what it is, it was developed by The Minimalists and what you do is every day of the month, like the first of the month, you order one thing, the second you order two things. . And so on throughout the month, where towards the end of the month, you get rid of 21 things in one day and 22 things the next day.

And in the end, depending on how many days of the month, we did it in April when it was 30, it ended up being 465 items that left your house. But what was interesting was the habit and the change in mindset that occurred around our things while we were doing them. I did it with them. I didn't get to the end because we didn't have a lot of stuff, but everyone was commenting and saying, wow, I'm looking at these things very differently now at my house. If you want to do it, they encourage you to find a partner to do it with.

I'll put a link below. But again, it was about developing the mindset by doing this every day. And what happens is that we look at things in our house differently and we begin to constantly evaluate the things around me. I realized for myself when I was doing it, one day I was in the bathroom and I was thinking, okay, I have to find three things today, and I'm finding my three things. And I'm looking at some of the other things in the drawer and I'm like, Oh, I'll come back for that tomorrow. And you begin to be aware of where the clutter is in your house, but you are also developing your tidying muscles.

We have talked about this. It's kind of like if you work out, if you only work out once on Saturday for a couple of hours and then you don't work out again until the next Saturday or the next Saturday, because there was a baseball tournament or whatever, you know. , the one your kids had to go to, you're not building your muscles, are you? This is very similar in the sense that you are strengthening this mentality of separating ourselves from our things, this habit of constantly letting things leave our house. And you really start, at the end of the month, to develop this aversion to things.

You're like, this is a waste of time, this is a waste of energy. I mean, it's great to have been doing this all month, but I could use that time for something else. I don't want to keep these things anymore. And then, by the end of the month, you say, get this garbage out of my house, I don't want it anymore. And I don't think we'll get to that point where we do these big chunks of time less frequently. You might be able to do it, but I really believe that getting to that point of despising your stuff is a daily habit and creating it.

One way is to do the Mins Game. They have a game board that you can print. And like I said, if you can find someone else to do it with you, you'll generally be much more successful at it. But the other thing is that you can set a timer. I would recommend doing it in the morning when you have more energy. I don't know about you, the things I put off towards the end of the day often don't get done. So maybe first thing in the morning you just go find five things to organize. You could involve your family in it, you could make it into a game.

You could say, okay guys, we need to find five things quickly, come on. See how fast we can do it. But however you do it, I want to tell you that it is not as difficult as losing weight. I guess I don't know if it's just me, but I often think about new habits that I want to develop, like, well, I tried to lose weight and it didn't work. It is not like this. I think you'll find that after a couple of days of doing it, it's actually kind of a fun challenge. You say, challenge accepted, game, let's get this trash out of our house.

So I know starting new habits is hard, but I feel like this habit in the grand scheme of habits is actually pretty easy to develop. So I don't want to set you up for failure. My goal is to set you up for success. And I really feel like this is something you can stick with, again, if you have limited time or energy. And the other thing too, as we're developing this habit, and as you look at the things you need to sort out in your five-minute sessions, what I really want to encourage you and remind you of is that if I don't have any Now I'm going to draw a clock.

So if I don't have time now, I probably won't have more time in the future. I mean, we thought, Oh, if I tidy up my house, I'll have more time. But speaking from experience, even once we got our house in order, we still had kids and we still had a very full life. So it's not like I'm sitting around on a Saturday afternoon thinking, what am I going to do with my time today? still gets full again. And I know we often hold on to things thinking, well, when I have timeFor that. When the kids are a little older, when it's summer vacation, when I go on vacation, when I do this, then I'll have time.

I really want to encourage you that if you don't have time for this stuff now, like I'm 99% sure I can tell you, you won't have time for it in the future. Now we can pick one thing, a hobby, a craft, like, I'm going to keep my quilting stuff because I think I'll have time for that. Well. But I'm not going to have time to quilt and crochet, or stamp rubber, or cross-country ski, and you know what I mean? So maybe choose something you hope to have time for, maybe books you want to read or a hobby.

But beyond that, if we don't have time for it now, I really want to encourage you that I don't think you're going to have time in the future. And again, if our goal is to get to a disaster-proof home, I really want to encourage you to let those things go. It's hard. We spend money on it. We have these really optimistic thoughts about the future. But if we really hope to make this house disaster-proof, we'll probably have to let some of that go. But this is what I will tell you. Do you know what it means to let go of those things, those things you hoped you would have time for one day?

Do you know what happens when you finally get rid of that? Peace of mind. The guilt has left the building because I no longer have to look at it and remember it. I can't believe how much of those things I hoped to get someday, how much they were hanging over my head, how much it bothered me, how much it ate at me that I spent money on it, what I wasn't using. he. I let those things go and my brain felt so much better. I was much happier when I didn't have those things hanging over my head.

And so I know, I know it's not always easy. But if you're doing these five-minute stretches and maybe slowly getting rid of them, you'll get to a point where it won't be as hard and you'll get there. I can't emphasize enough how powerful this daily habit of decluttering is. And so do whatever it takes to acquire that habit. Making the game of minutes. Set a reminder on your phone. Ask a friend to help you hold yourself accountable. Send someone photos every day of the things you are ordering. If you get your kids involved and tell them every day that we're doing it successfully, I'll pay you a dollar.

Whatever we have to do. But it's very worth it. It is worth it and will make your home easy to care for. It will make it enjoyable. So as we clean it up, as we disaster-proof it, which is a lot of fun, I think you'll find that you really love your house again. You like it there and you may even like your family members a little more. So I hope this helps. Another video I made recently that I think might be helpful was The Power of 5 Minutes. That was actually one of my favorite videos I've ever made.

So I'll definitely link to that, as well as five tips to declutter faster. I thought they were pretty good too, if I do say so myself. So I'll link them below. But if you haven't already, I hope you'll subscribe so we can spend more time together. I know you can do it. Like I said, I won't set you up for failure because that's not okay and that's not what friends do. So I know you can do this. I'm very excited for you. I hope you have a great day and I hope to see you again soon.