Timer

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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…

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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…

Playgroup labels and dish-rack
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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…

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Power through your To-Do list with a dice!

ByRosie

Some years ago, Lori (one of the regulars on a Flylady system based Facebook page) invented a collaborative game she called “Flylady Bingo” as a motivating way to get through her to-do list, completing 6 x 15 minute tasks in two hours.  The facebook group has now closed, but fortunately you can use a variation on this technique and go it alone with a dice (or dice app), a glint in your eye and a determination to get things done. This is an excellent way…

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Just one thing: The power of the timer

ByRosie

So this morning I shared a post from I dream of Clean on the HomeRoutines Facebook page, and asked: Do you have one little thing that would make a big difference if you got it done? We often have these little things on our “quality of life” to do list! I have a giant toddler handprint on my living room window – I think I will get to it because it is terribly distracting! and then kept on sitting on my butt reading through my…