landlord said no garden access and I said L + ratio + 2kg of perfect fruit rotting on the vines. dickhead.

learn to associate cleaning with pride instead of shame and your quality of life will improve in ways you can’t even imagine btw

another huge piece of advice: separate out ‘tidying’, 'cleaning’ and 'organising’ in your head. they’re not the same thing and a lot of paralysis and overload comes from either misidentifying what your space needs, or trying to do all of them at once with conflicting goals.

TIDYING means clearing space, making your environment orderly and inviting. it usually entails removing clutter from surfaces, clearing the floor so you can move around easily, and creating psychological ease by putting everything visibly in its place. It’s very visual, and can also involve things like straightening picture frames, squaring pillows, folding blankets on the couch, etc. It reduces chaos and noise and makes a space comfortable.

ORGANISING means sifting through belongings, ensuring that what doesn’t need to be kept is thrown out and what does need to be kept is kept well. This often means categorising by room and function – teaspoons go in the teaspoon drawer, and the teaspoon drawer stays in the kitchen. It can also mean indexing things so you can find them easily (markers sorted by colour, paperwork divided into topical folders, books alphabetised) and preserving things (moving photos out of direct sunlight, keeping open flour in a sealed container, sleeving trading cards).

CLEANING means removing built up dirt, dust and grime, reducing the level of environmental contaminants and making your space sanitary. Bacteria are a fact of life, they love to hang out in dust and cling to pet hair and multiply on any given surface. Cleaning is how you keep that stuff in check, preventing it from building up to the point it affects your health. This means wiping frequently touched surfaces with disinfectant, sanitising utensils (doing the dishes), washing bedding and clothes (and yourself), and sweeping/vacuuming and taking out the trash to physically remove dirt from your home.

Tidying is not the same thing as organising – shove the mail, bills, dirty teaspoons and your gardening gloves in a drawer, and you’ve tidied the table. Sort the paperwork into piles by deadline, put the teaspoons in a cup, and roll the gloves together so they don’t get separated, and the table is untidy but organised.

Similarly, a tidy or organised space can still be filthy. Just because all the yellowed newspapers and trash bags are sorted by date in the basement, out of sight, doesn’t mean they’re clean. A chaotic, cluttered space can still be very sanitary if it’s being kept clear of refuse, and wiped and dusted often.

Sometimes tidying makes your space less organised, and vice versa. Organising often shakes out a lot of dust and makes the space dirtier. The classic “it’s even worse than when I started” feeling is often the result of going into a room with the intent of tidying, then actually starting the task of organising instead. It’s a lot easier to tidy an organised space, and organising first is usually the right instinct, but the distinction isn’t intuitive so the sudden cluttering effect can be really demoralising. Remember they’re three different things with different goals. Sometimes they overlap, but sometimes they conflict. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.

tips for managing cleaning/tidying in a way that gives you a sense of control instead of dread and shame:

dishes

- wash at least one dish every day. could be a single fork. just do one. at absolute worst this means you’re regularly running clean hot soapy water through the heap of backed up dishes in the sink.

- any time you have to wash a plate or utensil because you’re out of clean ones, wash two of them. need a knife? wash two knives. need your only baking sheet? wash a cup too.

clutter

- overwhelmed by clutter? take out the bins and do laundry. it’s very difficult to organise a space when it’s full, and trash and dirty clothes take up a lot of space both physically and mentally. emptying bins makes room for the whole cycle to move.

- those little boxes and containers advertised for ADHD really do work, even if you don’t have ADHD. they let you move surface clutter around even if you don’t have time to sort and clear it. you can quickly box up the craft project that’s been taking up your desk for two weeks, clean the surface, and put everything back.

- on that note @3liza clued me in to the power of a simple wicker basket a decade ago and it changed my life. this isn’t a desk tidy, this is a medium to large box or basket without a lid that you can comfortably carry in two hands (doesn’t have to be wicker). personally I like a collapsible one so I’m not tempted to fill it with stuff when it’s not in use. the point of it is collecting and carrying.

- instead of taking on individual sidequests for every item in an overcluttered room, walk through with your simple wicker basket and collect everything that has to go in the kitchen. take it to the kitchen, put it away. then collect everything for the bedroom. take it to the bedroom, put it away. it’s your sifter, your filter, your best friend. this is but one use of the simple wicker basket.

trash

- differentiate in your head between dry trash and wet trash. dry trash is paper, plastic wrappers, packing foam, scrap fabric, dried up pens. ‘shelf stable’ trash, if you like. nothing likely to leak or rot. this can be collected in small lined wastepaper size bins around the house – one in every room honestly isn’t overkill. you only have to empty these when they reach the top of the container.

- wet trash is food waste, soiled or greasy food wrappers, empty bottles, sanitary products, used medication ampoules, anything contaminated by mould or pest damage, etc. the yucky stuff. this goes in a single, large, lined bin with a lid, in a central part of the house (probably the kitchen). Empty this every 3-4 days or as soon as it reaches the top of the container. it won’t fill up as fast without dry trash bulking it up, and disposing of it in small amounts regularly keeps the place feeling fresh. importantly it also means the gross stuff is contained in one place, not wearing on your peripheral attention day after day making you feel bad.

generally

- everything I said about clutter and surfaces above also works for floors. you can take stuff off the floor, vacuum, and then dump that shit right back where it was. you don’t have to wait for one glorious day when you have the energy to do everything.

- the longer something goes untouched, the worse it gets psychologically. if a particular area of mess is especially upsetting or daunting to you, agitate it. pick up just one thing. dust around it. divide it in two. do anything you can bear that gets you to engage with it and handle it. it’s manageable. you’ll get there.

- never ever ever ever feel bad about spending money on trash bags, gloves, disinfectant wipes, sponges, or whatever you need to comfortably stay on top of things. you’re allowed to use cleaning products and you’re allowed to just throw shit out.

nasty amount of tumblr class discourse boils down to “how can my superior access, resources and quality of life be a privilege when I pay for them fair and square”

THE-TOXIC-PASTE-REPORT