Tracey Rissik

For busy people, especially those who work outside the home or have children to look after, one way of improving the work-life balance is to do smart housework. Don’t work yourself into the ground trying to clean your household every weekend! Tackle small things in 10-minute chunks, and you’ll be surprised how much gets done, and how much less stressful it can be.

There’s a saying “A cluttered space leads to a cluttered mind”. In these times of information overload, and too many things to do and remember, decluttering your home can help to calm the mind!

Here are some things that I’ve tried, and have found effective:

1. Instead of trying to vacuum every inch of your house every week, do the main hard-traffic areas in a quick “blitz” and leave the thorough vacuuming to every other week – a freshly vacuumed carpet makes a whole room look better, and 10 minutes will get most of your main areas sorted out.
2. Make trips around the home multi-purpose. If you’re taking the laundry from the bedroom to the washing machine, on the way back to the bedroom, run a duster over the flat surfaces in any rooms you pass through – skirting boards in the passage, or the coffee table in the living room.
   Constant dusting in little bursts is more effective as dust doesn’t have time to settle & become noticeable, so you can keep on top of things with a bit less effort.
3. If you find clutter tends to congregate in certain areas, like kitchen or hall tables, analyse your habits to see if you can do things slightly differently – for example, don’t leave your keys on the hall table; have a designated and convenient place for them – perhaps a drawer in the hall table, or hooks in a convenient spot close by. This will reduce the amount of clear-ups you’ll have to do when something can’t be found or you have visitors coming round and you need to clear the coffee table, for example.
   If decluttering-on-the-move like this isn’t practical, then get into the habit of a 5-minute mini clear-up at the end of each day. It saves a lot of time in the long run.
4. Clear out your purse or wallet at least twice a week – ditch all unnecessary paper into the paper recycling bag, put anything with sensitive information into the “to shred” pile, and file all card receipts to reconcile against your bank statement, before they are also shredded. Doing this for 2 minutes every 3 or  days reduces the amount of paper that can accumulate over time if it’s not properly attended to.
5. If you’re a car-clutterer, make time at the end of a working week to spend 5 minutes putting maps back in the glovebox, removing sweet wrappers and old water bottles, and taking stray gloves or jackets back inside. Apart from making cleaning easier over time, it’s a deterrent to vandals who might think there’s something valuable in the pile of junk on the back seat!
6. If any of you are like me & love collecting trivia from magazines and newspapers, you know how this can grow into an unmanageable drift of paper over time. In this high-tech age of ours, I have the perfect solution: scanning! If I find an article or picture I just have to keep, I’ll tear it out of the magazine or paper, and then scan it in, name the resulting file sensibly, and file it on the hard drive of my computer.

   Tip: set up a computer filing system that makes sense to you. If you copy someone else’s system, but it doesn’t make sense in your mind, you won’t use it.
   –> I categorise things (e.g. finances, house, CV, Travel, quotes, wine) and have sub-folders where necessary – under finances, I’ll have taxes, banking and insurance. I also name each new file with the date as the first part of the name so that I can always find things chronologically. BUT… this only works well if you use the year-month-day format YYYYMMDD; otherwise the order is fairly random.

7. Keep floors clear! If something gets left on the floor and it doesn’t belong there, put it back where it belongs! This is particularly helpful with shoes, clothes, books and magazines. I have finally, after 20-plus years, started lifting my books and magazines from the piles that grow around my flat, and it really makes a difference!

Well, if this isn’t enough to get you started, drop me a note & I’ll dig up some more time-saving hints & tips! Until then, good luck with these new habits!

Tracey