serene | Baby steps, day nine (Reply)

(The baby steps are at this FlyLady link.) I'm adding "(and do 15 minutes of decluttering)" to every day's tasks, because until I get rid of the clutter, I'll never get on top of the cleaning.

Day One: Shine the sink
Day Two: Get dressed to lace-up shoes
Day Three: Read FlyLady BigTent emails
Day Four: Look at sticky note (in bathroom and kitchen)
Day Five: Write down negative things you're saying to yourself, then write down positive stuff to counter that
Day Six: Spend two minutes on a Hot Spot
Day Seven: Pick out clothes for tomorrow
Day Eight: Make binder for control journal

Day Nine: Today we are going to learn how to declutter our homes a few minutes at a time with some fun tools that you might have been wondering about from the reminders you have been reading in our e-mails. Making it fun will get the job done! Read the Decluttering FLYing Lesson! Today, add a five-minute room rescue to your Morning Routine.

As I get going, the two-minute or fifteen-minute things are way more time than I need for the task in front of me. Today, two minutes easily took care of two hotspots (the island and the dining table), so I also did the little table I use as a side table by the comfy chair. In these photos, you can also see a lot of the clutter on my floor. I'll get to it eventually, as I work my way around the room. I'm not going to let shame force me not to post these photos.

I posted the before pic of this bookcase yesterday, but I finished it today:

And had time left to start this one:

Didn't get that far on it because it involved some putting things away in other rooms, but not bad, and I'm sure I'll finish it tomorrow:

Next, the five-minute room rescue. She says to pick the room you don't like letting people into because it's so messy, so I'm gonna start in the bedroom.

Bedroom before:

Bedroom after five minutes of "rescue":

So basically, I'm doing the following every day now, on top of stuff like getting dressed, that I was already doing:

Two 2-minute Hot Spot clearings
One 5-minute room rescue
One 15-minute decluttering session
About ten minutes keeping the sink clean (I'm not 100% compliant with this part)
About five minutes reading the FlyLady and Unfuck Your Habitat stuff

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So I've worked up to about 40 minutes a day, and I'm telling you, the place looks SO much better already, after just a week. If I can just keep it up, this could work. And I already see that certain things require mere *seconds* of upkeep if I do them every day.

And another nice thing? I've done almost everything on my list, and it's still morning. It feels good.