How to get started

hot.chick

Hi all,

I'm sure you'll have been asked this is the past.

But how did you get started, both on the old style and fly lady ways.....

I seem to always be behind on washing and cleaning and putting away.. I think we just have far too much stuff and not enough time to dedicate to putting it all away.....

Other people seem to manage it so why can't we (me and DH)- we are profesional adults who both manage departments in our profesional lives, but when it comes to getting on top with the domestic side of our lives we fall down flat!!!

I love to cook - and DH isn't bad at lending a hand if given quite specific instructions (lol) so am looking for help with a plan of action to get our home life sorted!!!

Any and all suggestions and advice welcome!

Thanks in advance

Mr & Mrs Chick

ashbart

Don't overwhelm yourself with too many ideas at once. Join the flylady thread or just lurk and follow for a while first) and take one step at a time. If you give yourself too much to try at once, you will be inundated and find yourself falling even further..! Give yourself a few goals every week and start from there. Ie: Finish one week of level one on flylady. And then, every week/fortnight, gradually add on a few more goals - but only what you are comfortable with.

Hope this helps!

newlywed

While I'm cooking dinner after work (I don't sit down when I get in, just start cooking otherwise I'd never get up and get round to it), if something has a bit of time to wait (eg in oven, or on stove) then I fill the washing machine (or empty it), hang stuff out on the airer, make lunches for next day, clean worktops.

It depends on how much time I have to wait before the food is ready and what really needs doing. That way, when dinner is cooked I can sit down and relax cos most of the jobs are done.

I stack the dishwasher at night and then empty it in the morning before breakfast each day.

I think it's mainly having a routine means you just get on and do it until it becomes a habit.

But flylady says concentrate one new habit a month, then next month introduce an additional one.

foreversomeday

Hello!

I hope my post will be helpful as I am still just getting started.

I'm 7 months pregnant and have been unable to work for the past few months, I have been working for AQA which has helped with the money side of things but the pregnancy fog is taking over and I just couldn't seem to get motivated at all. I started to feel really depressed because I just thought... how come everyone else can tidy and clean and I can't manage it at all? Possibly some of it is to do with the fact my mum never really insisted me and my sister help with the housework and we all agree it would have been helpful if we had been used to it from a younger age, but I decided to myself that blaming it on that was really being lazy and I ought to be able to manage it.

I would spend all day thinking about how I really should get round to doing this or that, or oh, I will do that in half an hour, in an hour, after I have eaten, had a lie down, read this thread, had a shower... etc etc! My OH would come home from work and see the house in the same state that he had left it in the morning and get frustrated because he felt he was working hard to earn money and I wasn't even doing one thing a day to help out. I could see his point but I still couldn't manage to motivate myself to do anything until I just got really really down one day and made a post on here, fully expecting everyone to turn around and say "Don't be silly! It's easy to keep your house clean! Just do this list of 1001 things every day and stop being so lazy!!" - but nobody said that at all, in fact they were all lovely. Suddenly through all the negative voices in my head which had been saying all along "You're so useless! Everybody else can manage it and you're just lazy. What is wrong with you?" came these voices of friendship which told me "You can do it, everyone finds it hard, especially at first, but you don't have to do everything at once. Start with baby steps and work your way up."

Someone directed me to the flylady site - I hadn't ever even clicked on the flylady thread before and I didn't realise there was a website - and I looked at the website and it was one of the best things I've ever done (that sounds so sad!! Lol!!).

I clicked on the baby steps link on the left, and the first one was to Go Shine Your Sink. Hmm, I thought, what's the point of that? It's all full of greasy water and washing up (left by our lodger) and I don't want to touch it. And anyway it will be full of dirty water and dishes tomorrow anyway. But because I like procrastinating, I decided to click on the link to see how she suggested you shine your sink anyway.

The first instruction was "Take all the dishes out of the sink". And do you know what - that was it. That was my turning point. I realised how silly my excuses were and I smiled, and I emptied the sink, then emptied the dishwasher and put the whole contents of the sink in the dishwasher. Then I shined my sink!

I did have a bit of a blip when the lodger decided to fill my nice shiny sink full of greasy water and washing up and left it for about 24 hours, but when I first found the website I was excited and emailed my mum and she came round the next day and saw my sink and we cleaned it out together and it didn't take any time at all, and I had a word with the lodger and I have a shiny sink all the time now. I have even progressed onto reading the flylady thread and this week I have decided to do level 1 for each day - next week I might try one task from level 2 some days. And although I don't feel like I'm doing much housework day to day, the house looks a lot cleaner and tidier and it makes me feel much happier to know I have accomplished something every day.

Oh - and I showed my mum the site too and she really liked it so we are going through the flylady thing together and really supporting each other with it. It is surprising how fun it can be if you do it with other people - one of the reasons I think this site is so great as you can make friends on here to support you too.

So my tip is... go to https://www.flylady.com, and click on the babysteps - and go and shine your sink! It takes an hour to soak the first time you do it so do that, and then use the hour to browse the rest of the site.

Good luck!

2cats1kid

The thing with Flylady if you follow it properly is that you don't really do much cleaning as such until you have thoroughly decluttered the zones, and most of my zones took 2 weeks of the 15 minutes a day before they were really truly decluttered. So I actually spent pretty much the first two months just decluttering! But once you have done that, it becomes so much easier because you have so much less stuff to get left out, and to tidy away when it does get left out. By then it has almost become second nature to declutter as you go along, so even if you backslide for a while, when you get back in the groove things aren't so bad as they haven't had the time to get as bad as they were to start with iykwim.

So right now as I look around the front room which looks like the four horsemen of the apocalypse have just ridden through (DD is on summer holiday!) I know that it would actually take very little to sort it out, so I am more inclined to sort it out, where before I would think there wasn't any point as it would take ages and be a mess again by tomorrow.

hot.chick

ok... been back on the FLY lady site... haven't looked on there for years...

and did u all REALLY start by just doing sinks or writting post it notes for days???

Would it still work as well if I did upto step 7 over and over for the first week so at least something got done, even if it's just 2 mins per day!

Mudbath

You could always try the flylady thread on this board. Even if you just do level one each day you start to see improvements. There's a lot of humour over there too which helps!!! Good luck changing your ways....if I can do it, anyone can! xx

lilac_lady

USe a kitchen timer so that you know that you'll only be spending a certain amount oftime cleaning or decluttering. Stop immediately it rings, take an hour's break to do whatever and then set the timer again.

zarazara

Hiya, well theres no such thing as "behind" just jump right in. set an egg timer for 15 mins and do SOMETHING anything, putting clothes away,washing dishes, anything. when the timer goes off STOP. set timer for another 5 mins and go and do something else, then when it goes off, stop and have a cup of tea. 20 mins or so lter set the timer for another short time, 10 mins, 15 mins, 20 ins, whatever suits, and carry on doing something.
its a great help to start by getting rid of stuff, give yourself a time limit, 10 mins 20 mins etc and grab a bin bag and fill it with unused or unworn or just plain unloved stuff, anything, rubbish, till receipts,empty cans,clothes,cushions, anything, then FLING. ITS VERY LIBERATING.
Have great fun.

foreversomeday

hot.chick wrote: »

ok... been back on the FLY lady site... haven't looked on there for years...

and did u all REALLY start by just doing sinks or writting post it notes for days???

Would it still work as well if I did upto step 7 over and over for the first week so at least something got done, even if it's just 2 mins per day!

To be honest I've used the site and the thread here as tools to adapt it the way I have felt comfortable. I haven't followed the days really once per day at all. After I had got past the first couple of days I was feeling more motivated and decided to try a level 1 task out of that week. My mum for example also uses the site but she doesn't feel the need to go through every step day by day as she wasn't feeling so demotivated in the first place, so she skipped the step with the post it notes and just decided to start adding tips and encouragements from the flylady thread to her usual daily/weekly routines.

I was feeling very overwhelmed and depressed though so I think it helped me to start one day at a time - since I was doing nothing anyway, slightly more than nothing was an improvement! And now I am feeling like I am doing a lot more.

2cats1kid

When I started they didn't have those beginner baby steps. I did the sink cleaning thing for a month and then promptly stopped, thus proving that a month doesn't make a habit after all LOL - actually I decided that clean bathrooms were what made me feel I was getting somewhere, and did those instead.

I worked in the correct zone at the correct time, decluttering 15 minutes a day minimum (sometimes multiple 15s but with a break between). When I had finished the decluttering (or at least had broken the back of it) I started doing the email missions too. Once I'd decluttered I used those 15 minutes to do cleaning and tidying, and often when the missions came through they'd be things I'd covered off already.