Noel Lynne Figart

I think I’m developing a bit of a split personality about having drunk the Flylady Kool-aid.

On the one hand, I really do like the system quite a bit.   Between the routines, the decluttering and the missions I get in the email, the house looks nice and runs smoothly.  Anyone could walk in right at this second and I would not be embarrassed about how the house looks.

On the other hand, I’m tired of reading testimonials about how a product has changed someone’s life on a site about decluttering.  I’m sorry, but “buy more stuff” is seldom a good solution to a clutter problem, especially when clutter and hoarding problems are usually related to problems with shopping too much in the first place!

On the other hand (yes, I know, three hands.  When do I ever follow a system without adding my own twist?  Get over it)  I’m all for people creating successful small businesses.  I do have a bit of a squick at the idea that she’s selling stuff to people with clutter problems, but only a small one. I mean, the woman sells cleaning cloths, for heaven’s sake.  I might have made my own out of old towels rather than bought some, but it’s a reusable product that’s genuinely useful.

I certainly don’t tell my family Flylady loves us and wants us to have a clean house.  (Yes, some of the testimonials posts have mothers saying that they’ve said this to their children.  I find that creepy as hell). I don’t don’t follow the system exactly.  I am wearing slippers, not shoes. I don’t “bless the house”.  I dust and vacuum.  I don’t put in 15 minutes of “loving movement”.  I work out!  I certainly don’t have some picture of a Cheerful Fairy with a fishing rod and tennis shoes shaking her finger at me on some household appliance.   I look at my schedule and think, “Yep, I need to empty the dishwasher.”

Certainly if all twee nonsense works, it works.  If you need all that to get organized enough to suit yourself, you need it.  I sympathize with needing tools.  My mother, for instance, does not need a notebook or a schedule to keep the house clean. She just does it.  She doesn’t need a battle plan for something as simple and obvious as housekeeping.

And that’s where I get really weirded out.  People will write the author of the Flylady site to argue with her about her system.

Why why why?

You don’t wanna wear shoes in the house, don’t.  If your life wasn’t changed by buying a feather duster, that’s just fine.  If you like spending one day a week cleaning the house from top to bottom rather than using routines, that’s your call.  If you don’t want to worry about having a clean house at all, whose damn life is it, anyway?

You don’t need Flylady’s permission.

Though, I am unsubbing from the list because I’ve got what works for me, and I’m not that into reading commercials.

I’ve been teaching my son to cook.  Tonight he made dinner by himself from a recipe, though he did have a bit of an issue with converting the rice recipe to more servings.

Still, the meal came out tasty.

But that’s not the story I wanted to tell.

See, I’ve been doing the Flylady system for awhile in my house.  Decluttering, Zone work, routines — all that smack.  It sounds goofy, but the house looks nice, so laugh all you want.

What’s even goofier is that I have a notebook for my household routines.  It’s a checklist of chores that need to happen every morning, early evening and before bed, as well as any zone work that needs to happen.  It’s a printout of a checklist in plastic sheet protectors, so I can just use dry-erase markers to check ’em off and wipe ’em off for the next day.  Laugh it up, but at least this means I get to detailed cleaning in each room.  I’m not naturally neat, and can ignore a pig sty for a long time (just ask my mother what it was like to raise me), so anything that works is really nothing short of a miracle.

I have it for myself, to keep me on track, but it’s on the counter in the kitchen because it also has the menu plan and the recipe book I’d written as a teaching tool for my son.

Tonight, the man of the house was cleaning up after dinner, and actually went through that checklist, sweeping the floor and things I don’t think are mentally part of washing the dishes in his eyes.

I hadn’t asked him to.  In fact, I’d assumed he hadn’t, didn’t look and just went to sweep the floor when he asked me if I’d looked at the checklist.  Since I do have the notebook mostly as a self-reminder, I didn’t give it a lot of thought.  Most of the kitchen cleanup had been done.  I just made coffee for tomorrow.

No, I don’t think a control journal (that’s what Flylady calls the household notebook), is going to make the household magic, and everyone will decide to be as concerned with keeping the house clean as the DCF.  It won’t.

And it doesn’t need to.

What is cool about it for my household is that it gives clear and rather impersonal guidelines for keeping the house clean and picked up.  Instead of a person constantly reminding, there’s this list that stays there all the time. Yeah, I know I wrote it.  That’s not the point.  It’s that what needs to be done and what gets done become impersonally clear at all times.

Now I’m lucky.  I live in a household of people that like to contribute.  I can’t imagine that if it were a household where people were upset with each other and didn’t mutually care about the condition of the home, nor mutually contributing to the pleasantness of the household that a control journal would do a damn bit of good.  So no, it’s not the magic a lot of Flylady testimonials like to put out there.

But it is a good tool.

I got bored yesterday and did something impossibly geeky.  I timed myself doing every single task on my Flylady routine.  Including cooking and making bento, it came to about ten minutes under two hours.  (Take away the cooking and bento and you’re looking at 1:16:10)

Now, in Real Life, I don’t do every chore myself.   That fifteen minutes it takes to do the evening routine is generally cut in half because the whole household helps clean up after dinner, set up the coffee pot for the next day and all that.  Call eight minutes at the outside.  I don’t clean every bathroom in the house, nor do I generally fold the laundry or take out the trash.

So the idea that you can keep your house clean in fifteen minutes a day is a little inaccurate.   It’d be fair to say I spend about an hour and a half, if I include meal preparation.

But it’s not like I spend that whole hour at once.  The routines really do average out to just under fifteen minutes for each of them.

What I don’t do:

Make the bed perfectly.  Good lord, what a waste of time.  Spread it up, toss the pillow shams at the head, you’re good.

Spend hours cleaning the bathroom.   Swish-n-swipe daily.  Hit it once a month with some serious detail cleaning over a week.  Good enough.

Let things pile up.  This is the biggie.  I hate to do things right away, I really do.  The problem is, if things do pile up, I’m less likely to touch them.  It gets overwhelming.  But dusting around piles, or trying to vacuum around stacks?  Who does that?  That’s too much to deal with!

Let the dishes sit overnight.  If I do that, the kitchen will look like a bomb went off in it inside of a week.

I try to obey the thirty second rule.  Basically, if it takes less than thirty seconds, do it right away.  The thing I’m worst about for this is coming home from a long day teaching, and I’m tired.  I often don’t put my materials away right away.  If I have more than one class in the week, this means by the end of the week I’ll have a pile of materials that have become part of the background.  They don’t jump out at me any more, so it may be another week before they’re put away.  This includes things like letting mail I need to deal with piled up “for later”, dropping my gym bag in the corner when I come back tired from a workout, instead of emptying the damn thing and throwing stinky towels in the wash and hanging up a wet bathing suit.  If I do it right away, the house stays clean.  If I don’t, oh my word, the clutter plies.

Is my house “perfect”?  God no!  There’s cat hair on the sofa, the shelves in the kitchen cabinets could do with a good wash,  I can see dust on the piano, there’s a catnip mousie in the middle of the living room floor, the entryway could use a mopping, and the floor of my bedroom closet,would cause me my mother to use the express “rat’s nest”.   Since I do Flylady, I have routines to take care of all those things in the proper time.  She breaks the house into zones for detailed cleaning.  I’ll get to the cathair when we’re in the living room zone, I’ll spend some times on the shelves when we get to the kitchen, I’ll dust tomorrow (I dust on Mondays), I’ll pick up the mousie the next time I get up to go to the bathroom (and drop my coffee cup into the dishwasher along the way), the entryway floor will get mopped when we’re in the zone to do that, and I’ll be spending fifteen minutes a day decluttering the bottom of my closet when we’re in the zone to work on that.

I’ll feel free to follow the maintenance schedule because clutter’s picked up and I don’t feel all stressed about it.  I don’t feel guilty that these things are dirty, either.  Things need to be attended to and a maintenance schedule works just fine.

But, keeping the house clean isn’t about going for that perfect look.  When you keep the house orderly, you rarely get that “OMG, I’ve worked so hard and now the house is all clean and shiny” feeling.   What I do have is a house that doesn’t embarrass me if someone drops by.

And yes, my sink is shiny.