With just motherhood OR mental illness alone, clutter tends to accumulate… and sometimes that clutter just gets too overwhelming to handle by sheer determination alone.
As a mother WITH mental illness, the mess can easily get out of hand. When we had a similar situation in our home, we created a clutter technique to handle the abundance of items.
Not only is this technique easy, it sets a time limit on how long you can spend dealing with the mess.
The Clutter Technique
With this simple technique, you not only remove the clutter and deal with it, you set yourself a time limit to keep the task from getting too overwhelming. The time limit could be more flexible, depending on the time available to you.
- Estimate how much time you have available, and set a timer for about 1/3rd of that time. So if you have an hour available, set the timer for twenty minutes.
- Designate areas for “donation”, “put away”, and “trash” (I put trash directly into a fresh trash bag or can).
- Choose the ONE location to target. We need FOCUS.
- As you empty the target location or area, sort the items into the designated areas. We are NOT putting things away YET. Trash can go into the trash bag, however.
- When the timer goes off, SWITCH from emptying the target location to dealing with the items that you sorted to “put away” with the remaining 2/3rds of your time (about forty minutes if you started with an hour).
- Take out the trash and make a plan to donate items or have them picked up (as soon as you can or they will likely just sit to go through the same process again).
- Rinse and repeat!
Notes on this Technique
Please keep in mind that you do NOT need to fill all available time. For instance, if you have three hours available, you may only want to give yourself an hour total, for everything in the clutter technique.. so you would still set the timer for twenty minutes, and use the remaining forty minutes to put away items. This helps keep the task from being astronomically large and unbearable.
If you are feeling particularly disorganized (I’m looking at you stay-at-home mama with your kids filling your schedule) and want to use a planner to help you get things together – but don’t have set times and places to be, I’ve got the perfect article for you… Using Your Planner (When You Don’t Go Anywhere) was written for pandemic times – when no one went anywhere – but applies perfectly to stay-at-home mama life, too.
Do you have a technique to help you tackle a particularly messy area or room? Let me know in the comments below!
Christian, wife, “hybrid” mama, I run the site All Behind A Smile to help others like me.
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