I am participating in Crystal Paine’s 4 Week to a More Organized Home Challenge.  I will preface this by saying that I utterly failed this week on all of my cleaning expectations.  It’s the end of the week and my house is a mess.

What happened???  I had such dreams of a clean, clutter-free house!

Be Realistic.

Anxiety comes when your reality does not meet your expectations.  Therefore, the easiest solution to having a cleaner home is to lower your expectations for perfection.

You might think that this is just the opposite or counterproductive, but it is not.  When I am a lot more relaxed about my surroundings, I tend to be less stressed out, which in turns means that I have more time.  Sounds crazy, right?  But it’s not.  Stress seems to always inflate time, making every job harder and every job take longer.  If you don’t believe me, can you remember a time that you didn’t get enough sleep?  Stress is like that.  It makes you dreary, it makes you sluggish, and most of all, it is bad for your health.

I wanted to do this challenge but this week was very busy for me.  I was outside of the house all week doing various things, such as doctors appointments, some training for a volunteer program, a court date, and a funeral.  Normally, I am at home and have a lot of available time to do things.  I was frustrated today, to say the least, when seeing my kitchen table.

But this is not realistic.

If I’m normally at home, and this week, I am not, then I can’t expect my kitchen table to look nice when it is something that I would do each afternoon before the Husband comes home.  It’s just going to cause you stress, and if you are like me, that causes PROCRASTINATION.

What did this mean for me this week?

I took Crystal’s suggestion and only did the things in bold, but when I went to do them, I discovered that I didn’t need to do them.  This was because they were recently done.

So I took the opportunity to clean off my kitchen table, which would make me happy after a long week.

I even found some clothes to give away in the “Find 7 items to get rid of today.”

Today’s challenge is to clean out the couch, which I will end up doing because no matter how many times you clean the couch, it is still dirty.  Especially with three kids, two dogs, a cat, and two adults.

Thanks, Crystal, for a great challenge!

With love,

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Let me know what you think in the comments.