Home Routines blog

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    Newsletter June 2024

    ByRosie

    Hello, friends! How is your June going? It’s the middle of winter, here in New Zealand. Where we are (Auckland) it’s pretty mild, so for me this just means a light cardigan on errands day. Or a puffer jacket if I go for a walk down the chilly beach (for mental health purposes, and to say hello to local dogs) ⭐️New Home Routines app later this year!⭐️ We’ve been working hard at a refreshed version of Home Routines. Our first version was released in 2010…

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    “5 by 5s” five star rating!

    ByRosie

    Recently I’ve been really enjoying catching up on the excellent videos and resources produced by Steph at The Secret Slob. She has a great speed cleaning hack that she calls “5×5”. She uses a timer to keep on task, and zips around cleaning five rooms, for five minutes each. If she has extra time at the end of a room, she pops back to the “worst room” to do a little more there. (There is so much more on her Youtube channel, have a look…

  • Half-Tidying avoidance

    ByRosie

    “Half-tidying” is when you only sorta-kinda put things away.  You know, you open the bathroom cupboard, scrunch up your eyes and just shove that new shower-puff into the nearest space. I’m prone to this because if I look properly I get stressed about where the “correct” place is to put that thing, and in order to locate that “correct” place I think I need to empty everything out of the cupboard and have an extended Tetris-type arranging party and it will take hours I tell…

  • Half-Tidying (AKA I’ll just leave this here)

    ByRosie

    Here are some things I have “just” put in the wrong place “for now” in the past day or so. You know. Then Dan Howell (Danisnotonfire) from the You Tubes talked about it better than me. (note: video includes cussing) One week ago I did a hard-core complete tidy of this room and yet here I am standing in a post-apocalyptic laundry pile. … So, how did this happen? I’ve thought about it and I think it’s because people tend to only ever do half-tidies….

  • Doing a small thing is better than doing nothing when you’re feeling stuck

    ByRosie

    Here’s the thing.  There’s a lot of productivity advice that says, well, if you don’t know what to do, do the thing that’s in front of you.  If a job is going to take less than two minutes, do it NOW. Put on your big girl undies, lace up your Doc Martens and get the heck on with it. This advice is just jolly splendid when  I’m well rested and having a good mental health day and I’m right up for the kicking of butts…

  • Mmm, frog

    ByRosie

    I’m kind of fond of frogs. My maiden name was a little bit froggish (well it had a “croak” in it!) and I used to love the Mercer Mayer books about that mischievous wee froggy and his shenanigans with his boy. Anyway, there is a lot of advice shared about eating frogs in the productivity-sphere of the internet. It all comes back to a quote from Mark Twain, who said: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to…

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    Rock that timer – 15 minutes of sucky tasks

    ByRosie

    I wrote yesterday about rocking your timer, but this morning I read Steady Mom’s post about Suffering for 15 minutes and it was groundbreaking to me. A lot of advice seems to assume that once you decide to set your timer to do something that you’re immediately going to spring up full of vigour and wipe the aftermath of toilet training from your bathroom floor while singing Happy Happy Joy Joy and doing a vigorous, improvised toilet-cleaning boogie. But Gretchen Rubin (of The Happiness Project)…

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    Rock that timer: Using a timer to get started and keep going

    ByRosie

    Take five minutes. Just five. Set a timer. If you’re on the couch or in bed, look to see the closest surface to you. It’s probably the coffee table or your nightstand. For those five minutes, just focus on that one surface. Clear it off, throw stuff away, maybe even dust it. So when your five minutes is done and you’re back in bed, you have one clear surface to look at. You have an accomplishment to focus on. You did something. You don’t have…

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    Find your Most Important Tasks. Do them.

    ByRosie

    I don’t know about you, but I usually have about a million things that I feel like I should be doing.  The end result is often… not actually doing them. I try and keep the regular, recurring tasks under control by corralling them into routines and zone tasks, but there are always one-off jobs and projects to keep under control. You can follow all sorts of powerful techniques to identify what to do next; what is urgent vs what is important, and what is urgent…

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    Why is it easier to clean up somewhere else?

    ByRosie

    Twice a week I take my rambunctious preschoolers to a local playgroup hosted in a church hall. It runs from 9:30 till 11:30, there is instant coffee and chocolate cookies, interesting toys and a sloping path for the kids to hurtle up and down riding on plastic tricycles. It is also securely fenced in, so I can take my eyes off them to make a cuppa without them making a run for the hills or the main road. Around 11am, a mysterious force calls us…