I’ve just finished reading Unclutter Your Life in One Week,by Erin Rooney Doland from Unclutterer.com

The book has lots of excellent advice and exercises to help you simplify, although I wouldn’t try and do it all in one week, not with three littles underfoot! There is nothing like uncluttering an area only to have little people discover all the “New” things that you’ve just uncovered!

Erin talks about creating routines in several sections of the book (yay), so I thought I’d have a go at setting them up in HomeRoutines.

Laundry

Erin’s suggested Laundry Routine for families has a focus on a particular sort of laundry for each day of the week – adult clothes, linens, children’s clothes etc.

We do something like this, except the vast number of soggy teatowels, dishcloths and flannels that are produced by three grubby children end up being added to the wash every day – included here, politely, as “kitchen,” rather than our family term of  “wet and smellys”

The Catchup on Sunday was also my addition – Erin is much more organized and has “Rest” on Sunday.

Zone Cleaning

Erin suggests that each weeknight you spend half an hour cleaning – first 10 minutes of general pickup, and then 20 minutes focusing on a specific area.  Her schedule follows a different area of the home for each day of the week (eg Kitchen and Dining on Mondays, Bathrooms on Tuesdays etc)  This schedule is one of the most frequent feature requests for HomeRoutines, and our upcoming release will include up to 7 zones so that you can have one zone per day of the week. 🙂 I’m looking forward to it myself!

For now – here is how it would look if you arranged your rooms to Erin’s schedule. It’s really easy to arrange rooms in whichever order you like on the Setup Zones and Rooms screen, just drag them around.

Daily Routines

Erin encourages her readers to establish regular routines throughout the day, which we already know all about:

• Morning Routine
• Welcome Home Routine
• Dinner Routine
• Before Bed Routine

The Welcome Home Routine is an excellent idea, and hopefully if I follow it I will not end up with my bag (and car) full of receipts and cookie crumbs.

Here’s my adaptation:

Unclutter Your Life in One Week has a lot more to it than just routines – there’s something in there for everyone, whether you’re just getting started at organizing and decluttering, or you’re just looking for that little bit of extra advice.

My very favourite bit in the book is the very last sentence:

Give yourself a virtual gold star, because a real gold star would be just clutter.

🙂