Other people in your household clean up after themselves more
because you're showing them by example how you want things to
be. I'm Ronnie, and you're listening
to Clean With Me, the podcast where I walk you through
cleaning your house step by step.
When you clean along with this show, you'll get more done in
less time, so you can spend the rest of your day doing what
matters most to you. Thanks for joining me.
In today's episode, I'm going to talk about the importance of
staying on top of things. And since this is more of a
topical episode, I encourage you to work on whatever needs to be
done at your house. I have a lot of episodes about
doing dishes, cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the bathroom,
picking up the outer areas, picking up your bedroom, making
the bed. And if you need to complete one
or more of those tasks, by all means do that.
This would also be a great episode to listen to while
you're doing a deeper cleaning task.
Sometimes people write in and ask for an episode to listen to
while they're washing all of their windows or cleaning their
oven. Another thing you could do is
get caught up on laundry. And if you're new to the show,
in most episodes I talk you through cleaning specific areas
of your home. I talk you through doing the
dishes. But once in a while, I like to
do just a topical episode that's kind of a catch all for whatever
you need to work on at your house.
Obviously we all know on some level that it's easier to keep
up on housework than to catch up, but sometimes you just need
a reset. So if that's you right now and
you just need to do a little bit in each area of your home, I
encourage you to subscribe to my bonus content where I have lots
of episodes that are 40 minutes an hour.
And there are even some 2 hour episodes that you can unlock by
subscribing. And you can access those
episodes through Patreon, Apple Podcasts.
And to find out about all the options for supporting the show,
you can visit cleanwithmepodcast.com.
Or if you scroll back far enough, I've got some whole of
house episodes for free on this regular feed.
But this episode is more topical in nature.
Like I was saying, we all know that it's easier to keep up on
housework than to catch up. And sometimes we need a reset
where we clean the whole house. But then oftentimes the
challenge is in maintaining it, and that's what I'm going to
talk about today. And I realize when you have
babies and toddlers or just kids of any age, this can be
challenging. And I can't create a chore list
for you or solve all of your problems because everybody's
situation is different. But what I can do is give you
some little tips that I think will help you.
Something that's really been helping me lately is just a
different mindset about dishes. In the past, if you've been
listening to the show for a while, you know this.
I've talked about doing all of your dishes before bed.
I've talked about checking on the situation with your dishes
two or three times a day. But lately, I've gotten to the
point where virtually every time I walk into the kitchen, I wash
dishes. And that might kind of go
against the grain for you. You might be thinking, well, I
don't have time to do that. But since I'm doing that
throughout the day, there are only a few things in the sink
when I walk in and I quickly wash them.
And this does a couple of things.
It creates a higher standard for the rest of the family because
people in clean environments are less likely to be messy.
OK, for example, if your mom's kitchen is always Immaculate and
there's never a dirty dish in the sink, or your mother-in-law
just insert the person here who this applies to and you go over
to their house and you make a sandwich.
Of course you're going to clean up your mess and leave the
kitchen the way you found it. And hopefully you clean up after
yourself anytime you're at someone else's house.
But let's say you have a friend who's a super messy housekeeper
who's just the opposite end of the spectrum.
And you get a phone call and you have to leave, leave her house
in a hurry and you just leave your dirty plate on the coffee
table because she, you know, she wouldn't care.
And don't get me wrong, if someone's a good friend and they
know that you need to leave in a hurry and they offered to clean
up after you, great, that's being hospitable.
But my point is that we all have a tendency to clean up after
ourselves a little more when we see that the standard is higher.
And that probably wasn't the perfect analogy, but you know
what I'm trying to explain here. So if you are a stay at home mom
or a homemaker, or you work and it's just your day off, I
encourage you to wash any dirty dishes every time you go into
the kitchen. And washing dishes can mean
different things. Your system might be to pre
rinse something and place it in the dishwasher, or it might be
to wash the dishes from start to finish.
Or if you're like me, maybe your kids are supposed to rinse their
plate and put it in the sink, but you'd rather wash it the
next time you go into the kitchen for a glass of water,
then wait and let the dishes pile up for several hours.
It's just something I want you to consider because it really
works. And sometimes we tend to do
things the way we were brought up.
But the way we were brought up was probably what worked best
for our parents. It doesn't necessarily work best
for us. OK, for example, when I was
growing up, we cleaned the kitchen like once or twice a
day. And when we did, there were a
lot of dishes to do. We loaded the dishwasher, we
hand washed some stuff, but my family didn't cook and we bake a
lot from scratch. We used a lot of convenience
foods so most things fit into the dishwasher and we're
dishwasher safe. Not as many people were home
during the day, so my mom didn't mind doing the dishes while
everybody was off at school and work.
Your schedule and your routine might be different than what you
were brought up with, so I encourage you to experiment and
figure out what works for you. I'm not the kind of person who
naturally cleans as I go. I'm a distractible person who
tends to leave things out. That's my natural tendency.
But I've grown past that and I've realized that it is so much
easier to wash a couple of things each time.
There's a tendency to procrastinate on it, but it's
just so much easier to do it immediately.
And this isn't just about dishes.
A lot of things we procrastinate on are tasks that might take one
to two minutes to complete, like clearing off the bathroom vanity
after you get ready. I mean, sure, you might have a
long commute or whatever, but you probably have time to clear
off the bathroom vanity after getting ready.
If not, get up 5 minutes earlier or something.
And no judgement here. If you're not already doing
these things that I'm talking about, chances are I'm a lot
older than you and it's taken me a lot long time to change
certain habits. This next one I'm kind of off
and on the wagon with, but last night I pulled some clothes out
of the dryer, folded them, hung most of them up.
One of my toxic household habits is the tendency to fold
everything and put it in drawers rather than hanging it up.
Even though whenever I organize my drawers and closet, I hang up
most things and then just put the small items in drawers, over
time I end up putting things in drawers that I really should be
hanging up. Like I hang up my dressiest
dresses, but I'm really supposed to, you know, based on my own
self-imposed rule, I'm really supposed to hang up my pants and
shirts. And the drawers are for things
like pajamas, undergarments, shorts, and maybe a few casual
T-shirts. But even the T-shirts I should
ideally be hanging up because I need the space in my drawers and
I need to keep my clothes put away and avoid having a large,
clean laundry pile perpetually. And last night was kind of a
reset for me. Not only did I put away the
clothes straight out of the dryer, but I pulled a lot of
things out of the drawers and hung them up.
And then I got rid of a few things.
I admitted to myself that it had been over a year since I'd worn
something and that I didn't want to wear it ever, ever again.
That's where a donation box or bag in the back of your closet
can help you. Because you want decluttering to
be kind of an, a lifestyle. Yes, we have days where we
declutter an area. You might even be doing that
while you're listening to this episode.
Maybe you're cleaning out a closet or something, but you
want to have a system for getting rid of things.
Just spur The moment you try on a bunch of outfits and you
realize that you just tried on something that you rejected last
time and that you're probably never going to wear it again,
Toss it in the donation box in the back of your closet.
Now obviously things like dishes and laundry and just picking up
clutter from around the house are super pressing it.
It's what keeps your house functional and livable.
But you want to strive to do the deeper cleaning tasks more
often. So you might want to consider a
habit that after you pick up the living room, you vacuum it.
And that may not be necessary, but if you have toddlers
dropping Cheerios everywhere, it might be.
Or your dogs are tracking in a lot of dirt and your floors are
dirty more often than not. You might want to add the habit
of sweeping or vacuuming right after picking up.
That one's not going to apply to everybody, but there might be
some some other habit that you need to implement, something
else that you need to do more often as a force of habit.
I'm talking about cleaning your house before it gets dirty,
doing dishes before they pile up, hanging up your clothes
before you run out of room in the drawers.
Or you're living out of a pile and it's slowing you down when
you're trying to get ready to go somewhere.
Or maybe you're going a long time without washing your
bedding. My habit on bedding is that when
I've washed all of my husband's laundry and my laundry, if it's
been a week, I wash my bedding next because I I'm switching the
clothes from the washer and the dryer.
The logical next step is to either put the sheets and
pillowcases into the wash or put the comforter into the wash.
I just continue that laundry session by washing my bedding.
And I'm not usually a weekly laundry person, but lately I
have been because I found that the washer and dryer a lot of
times are in use when I go to do laundry.
So my hampers been kind of filling up.
My husband and I have enough clothing to last us all week and
so lately I guess I'm just in a season of life where I'm washing
the laundry weekly and then I wash the bedding once I've
washed the clothing and towels. But you may have heard other
episodes where I talk about doing laundry approximately
twice a week or doing a load a day.
It just depends on the season of life, and I think one of the
keys to keeping the house clean, in addition to just changing
your habits, is being flexible and tweaking your routines.
You don't change everything, you don't reinvent the wheel, you
don't quit doing what works. But you might tweak something
like instead of doing laundry every day or twice a week, you
do it once a week and you include the bedding.
These are just ideas. The key is just raising the
standard so that your house doesn't get as messy.
Dirty laundry doesn't pile up, dishes don't pile up as often,
and the payoff is that you won't have as many overwhelming messes
to deal with. You won't feel as overwhelmed.
You'll be in a clean environment.
You'll go deeper while listening to these episodes because your
house won't be as out of control when you start an episode.
And if you're new to the show or you're just going through a
rough patch, don't beat yourself up up about it.
I'm just here to encourage you to get back in the saddle and
maybe change what isn't working. One of my biggest motivators for
keeping my bedroom and closet and bathroom organized, even
though visitors don't venture into the master bedroom and
bathroom and they don't see the inside of my closet, is getting
out the door faster, wearing fewer outfits that are repeats
because my clothes are organized and hanging up in the closet and
I'm able to use all of them. And then one of my motivators in
the kitchen to organize those unseen areas like the inside of
my cabinets and drawers is being able to find the tools I need
when I need them. And if you're wondering why it's
mainly the adults actually washing the dishes at our house,
it's because I don't like things to be put away wrong.
I like to be able to find all of my tools, you know, when I
decide I want to bake bread or cook a meal, I don't want to
have trouble finding things because somebody didn't know
where to put them. There's one specific daughter
who I have putting away clean dishes because I know she'll put
them away, right? She's naturally organized and
likes to put things where they go.
Our current system involves my husband and I mainly putting
away the dishes, except when it's on the chore list for my
daughter to put them away because she can be trusted to
put things away, right? I guess I just have a lot of
gadgets and a lot of cabinets and people can't seem to keep
track of where things go. But having an organized kitchen
makes it so much easier to cook. Keeping up on dishes makes it
easier to cook. No one likes to feel like, well,
I'm tired and I don't really feel like making dinner, and
I've got to spend an hour cleaning the kitchen before I
even begin. I mean, that's not the ideal
place to be, but we've all been there.
What if when you drag yourself into the kitchen to make dinner
at the end of a busy day, you find an empty sink or just a
cereal bowl and a spoon in the sink?
That's going to make cooking a lot easier.
And in turn, you're going to clean as you go because you're
starting in a clean environment and you're going to want to
maintain it. And what if when you're
listening to My Kitchen episodes, you barely have any
dishes to wash, so you're completing deeper cleaning tasks
like moving the oven and sweeping and mopping under it,
Cleaning the inside of your refrigerator and your microwave
so that when someone comes over, you're not embarrassed?
Or what if during the bathroom cleaning session, you're
organizing the cupboard under the sink because there's not a
lot of build up and it only takes you a few minutes to clean
the surfaces in your bathroom? I'm not saying any of this to
make you feel guilty about the way you've been doing things.
I'm just trying to get you excited and motivated about
cleaning as you go in every area of your home.
Again, cooking becomes easier, getting out the door becomes
easier. Other people in your household
clean up after themselves more because you're showing them by
example how you want things to be.
Or what about just feeling mentally at peace when you're
sitting in a clean house, doing whatever it is you want to do
and having more time to do what's important?
Like it says in my intro, I hope you got a lot done during this
episode, whatever you were working on.
Special thanks to my financial supporters who've unlocked bonus
episodes and are on the full program.
But even just listening to these free episodes helps me.
I appreciate each and everyone of you.
And as always, happy cleaning. I'll talk to you in the next
episode.