Hasta La Ideas

Reader Kristen submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

My fiancee and I will marry on May 1, and although we both currently room with VERY messy and disorganized roomies, we both agree on keeping our future home clean and organized. Do you have any suggestions, ideas that we should start out doing at the beginning, in order to build a “neat” future together?

Congratulations on your impending nuptials!

The two of you are already headed in the right direction with regard to an uncluttered and organized future because you are discussing these issues before moving in together. Open lines of communication are essential if the two of you want to avoid frustrations in your married life.

You may have covered many of these topics so far in your discussions, but give the list a look to see if there are still a few things you can hash out before heading down the aisle. Have pencil and paper with you during your discussion so you can make lists, charts, or just take notes about your talk so you can review them once you’re in your new place:

• A vision of your place together and how you will live in that home. Will your home be a place to entertain your friends and family, and how often? Will your home be a place to relax and rejuvenate after a day of school or work? How do you want things to look and what do you expect out of the space?
• What both of you be responsible for every day. Do you expect dirty clothes to be put into the hamper? Do you want all dirty dishes to be loaded into the dishwasher or will it be okay to have them sit in the sink? How long can a project mess be left out on a table or in a room? How will these responsibilities be met and when?
• What chores each person will be responsible for in the home. Will you take out the trash or will he? Will you change the kitty litter box or will he? Who will cook, clean up afterward, scrub the tub and toilet, vacuum the carpet, dust? How will these responsibilities be met and when? Divvy these chores up now to ensure that one of you won’t be carrying the full load.
• Plan for handling frustrations in the future. There will be times when one of you will be more messy than normal and this will bother the other person. How will you handle conversations about these frustrations so you don’t hurt each others’ feelings, show respect for each other, and help you find the best solution?
• Review policies. How often will you review your daily and chore responsibilities? How often will you unclutter your closets, garage, basement, and other storage spaces? Will you take on spring and fall cleaning? If you hire someone to clean, how often will you review their services and decide if you should keep them or hire someone new?

I’ll admit, these aren’t sexy topics to discuss before getting married, but they will help you significantly in your future life together. I wish my husband and I wouldn’t have waited more than a year after we were married to discuss them — it certainly would have alleviated a great deal of stress he felt about our place because of my clutter-bug and messy ways.

Thank you, Kristen, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column. Again, congratulations on your big day in May!

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.

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During a recent visit with my doctor, she commented that I don’t act like her other patients during visits. She said it’s obvious I have spent a lot of time with doctors because I’m not nervous and uncomfortable around her or her colleagues. She also said I’m one of the only patients who comes in with a list of topics to discuss and takes notes during visits.

I didn’t know my behavior was abnormal, but I can see how someone could not be herself around a doctor. Doctors can be intimidating, even those with amazing bedside manners. It would be easy to be anxious and/or timid around them — especially when they’re wearing those impersonal white lab coats.

At the end of the conversation with my doctor, I asked her if there was anything I could recommend to my friends and family to help them be better advocates for themselves and their health. She said it would just be nice if others did what I do. So, in a nutshell, this is what I do:

• Bring in a list of topics you want to discuss with your doctor to your visit. I usually start a list and add to it during the week before my scheduled visit.
• If you have specific ailments, bring in a log of how often you’re experiencing the symptoms and a diary of relevant data. (e.g. If your stomach hurts, a diary of food and beverages you’ve been consuming.)
• When the doctor says something confusing, immediately ask for clarification. I think doctors repeat the same advice so often that they forget it is the first time a patient is hearing it.
• Write down instructions, advice, and comments from the doctor to help you remember what was discussed. Most importantly, write down notes about any prescriptions or diagnoses.
• Call the doctor or the doctor’s nurse later if you have follow-up questions.
• If you don’t trust your doctor, interview other doctors to find one you are comfortable seeing. Call and have your files transferred to the new doctor from your old doctor.

I found this notepad pictured above from Knock Knock that I think could be useful. I don’t use something this formal, but I can see how the prompts on the notepad could really be helpful. Being organized before, during, and after a doctor visit can go a long way toward reducing the stress of the visit so you can be a good medical advocate for yourself.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

Reader Jenny submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

I am a 29 year old, married, full-time MBA student. I have ADD, and have poor time management skills and am usually scrambling to get my school work and TA duties done. Since my husband and I first moved in together 8 years ago, we’ve never been able to come up with a way of managing household tasks. I grew up with parents who were both lax with household stuff, and my husband grew up in a very clean house in which is mother did 90% of the cleaning. Because we haven’t figured out how to deal with this, there is a lot of resentment and our ability to communicate about the subject has deteriorated. We’ve tried a cleaning service (which now we can’t afford), but it didn’t help the issue with the clutter. Our house is big, and takes a long time to clean (but we can’t sell in this market). Any thoughts on how I can learn these skills?

Jenny, let me begin by saying I empathize with your situation. When my husband sat me down to talk to me about my clutter, I was working full time, going to graduate school, and completely clueless how to “keep house.” He was frustrated by how I was living, and I was completely overwhelmed by my mess.

The first thing you need to do is re-open the lines of communication with your husband. Sit down together on the couch, hold hands (I’ve found it really difficult to yell at someone if you’re holding hands), and start talking.

Share with each other how you want your life to look when the clutter is gone. What will you do together? How will you spend your time? How will you live in your house? Initially, don’t talk about the present. Don’t talk about what needs to be accomplished to get to the point in the future. Instead, define in concrete terms what your remarkable life looks like, feels like, and how you two will function as a couple. Both of you need to talk, and both need to listen. Be specific.

Write down your vision of a remarkable life so you can reference it later. There will come a time mid-way through the process when you are tired and don’t want to work any longer, and looking back over this paper will help you remember why you’re putting in so much effort. You’ll have to trust me on this, but once you know where you’re headed together, getting there will be a lot easier.

The second part of the process is more difficult because you’ll both want to express your frustrations for the way things are in the present. I recommend heading to your favorite bar or corner restaurant to work out this part of the plan. (Similar to holding hands, I’ve found being in a public place often keeps tempers under control.) The two of you need to decide what needs to get done around the house to get you to a manageable baseline, who will be responsible for each action, and when that action needs to be completed. Your list and timeline need to be reasonable (think weeks, months, maybe a year), so have a calendar and lots of paper for list making. Responsibilities should be divided as equally as possible. Even if one of you is responsible for a part of the house being extremely cluttered, the other one can be tasked with uncluttering, cleaning, and organizing the space. Your home is one of the physical spaces where your marriage exists, and you both are responsible for it from this point forward.

If your marriage is your biggest priority, and saving it is paramount to both of you, it means you’re both going to have to temporarily sacrifice something else to make that happen. You may have to stop watching television for a couple months or give up weekends camping with friends or stop procrastinating (the rush from finishing something at the last minute can be quite addictive). I’m not suggesting you drop out of graduate school and become a full-time homemaker, but you can likely find something you’re spending time on that isn’t important to the remarkable life you have decided you want together. You’re going to have to make difficult choices, but those choices are hopefully worth it.

Having ADD is going to make this process more difficult for you than your spouse (assuming he doesn’t have it). He needs to be aware of this and find fun ways to help you stay on track that don’t annoy you. He could hang silly signs in the house with phrases like “Honey, you are beautiful, especially when you’re cleaning out the linen closet!” He could tell you jokes every 15 minutes as a reward for staying on task. He could work by your side and help you maintain focus. The more support and compassion you have for each other, the better and faster you’ll work — ADD or otherwise.

Be sure you both eat right and get a decent night’s sleep throughout this process. Doing this will ensure you have the energy you need to go to work, school, and take care of things at home.

Once the major clutter is cleared, you’ll be ready for maintenance. What’s good is that the less you have, the less you have to clean, put away, organize, insure, and maintain. At this point, you can create a weekly chore chart to keep up with all the things around the house you both need to do. Get a copy of my book and check out pages 98 and 99 for an example of how you might structure your chart. In short, you’ll want to do 30 minutes a night of chores where you do a general cleanup around the house for 10 minutes and then spend the remaining 20 focused on a designated room of your house. As the two of you work, play upbeat music or make a game of racing each other through your chores. Find something positive to motivate each other. Check out “Exhausted after work” for more suggestions on how to handle these daily house-keeping activities.

Thank you, Jenny, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column. I hope that the two of you find a way to get out from under the clutter and get back to having a resentment-free marriage. As someone who has been where you are and is now living an uncluttered life, I can attest that it was worth every second of hard work. Good luck!

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

We’ve recently talked about strategies for curing your e-mail addiction to reduce the number of times a day you check your e-mail at work. With many of us in the western world having a day or two off from work this week, I thought it might be appropriate to address the addiction you might have with checking messages of all kinds when you’re not at work.

How many times have you been at dinner with a friend and she puts her phone on the table without any explanation? (I’m not talking about when someone is waiting for an emergency call, but rather when she simply doesn’t want to miss any social call that might happen to come her way.) How many times have you done it? How many times have you been talking with someone and he reaches into his pocket to check his phone to see if he has any messages? (Again, not when he is on call or expecting an important message, but because the person can’t go for five minutes without checking to see what may have filtered in.) Has this been you? Are you obsessed with checking your phone for voice mail, text, and/or e-mail messages?

An addiction to checking your voice mail, text and/or e-mail messages may be cluttering up your life. It also might be interfering with your pursuit of what matters most to you. Even if you’re not addicted, and you just wish these forms of communication took up less time in your life, try the following tips to get message checking under control:

• Determine why you are always checking your messages. What reasons are propelling you to check in all the time? Are these reasons tied to what matters most to you? Or, are they tied to insecurities or simply out of habit?
• If some of your reasons for constantly checking your messages correspond to what matters most to you — maybe your job or your family — can you find a way to make these checks less obtrusive? For instance, can you set a specific ring tone for calls and messages from your technical support team at work? Can you turn off your message notification sounds but leave on an alarm so that you check your messages only at specified intervals?
• If your reasons are tied to insecurities or out of habit, can you leave your phone in your car’s glove box when you go into an event so that you can have access to it if you need it, but that access is just annoying enough that you won’t do it unless there is a reason? Can you ask the person you’re out with to carry your phone for you while you’re together?
• Remember that people survived only a decade ago without constant access to voice mail, text, and e-mail messages. If someone needs to reach you in an emergency, there is almost always a way to do it. Portable communication devices are extremely convenient, but using them shouldn’t be cluttering up the remarkable life you desire or interfering with what matters most to you.

Good luck to anyone who is struggling with a message-checking addiction. I have to admit, the first three months I had my iPhone, I was definitely addicted. I got through it, though, by having my husband carry my phone when we were out together. Eventually, I broke the habit and the novelty of constantly checking for messages wore off.

Reader Montse submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

I’ve been living with my boyfriend for 3 years now. We live in a flat, not very big. I’m really worried about his stuff. He is a computer technician and although he’s really tidy with the stuff that he stores in the computer (pictures, scanned documents, etc.) he’s not so organized with the things (clutter) that are all over his desk. He can’t toss any old item (hard disks, cables, routers, etc.), as he is able to fix them quite frequently. He has all of this stuff widespread on his desk. I do not know what to do and how to convince him to keep them organized.

I would like to buy him some plastic drawers to keep his stuff. If I do so it is to help him to put those thingies in a place. I even can help him labeling the drawers with a labelmaker (that indeed he gave to me as a gift). His stuff will be at least out of sight but still available on his desk. However, I know that this does not solve the problem. Once the drawers are full, he will conquer the desk again, as he has done with some of the drawers from the closet that I emptied for him. I did so in order to avoid seeing his stuff on the desk, but that drawer is full now. So, the problem is not buying more storage as the room is not very big (just 8 m2). I would like to know if you have any clue about what type of storage would be the ideal one for this kind of stuff, and also if you have any piece of advice on how to let his things go and how to keep this type of things organized.

I know many people will disagree with me on this, but I’m of the opinion that his desk is his domain. If he wants it to be messy while he’s working, he should be allowed to keep it messy. As long as no one except for the two of you are coming and going in your flat, a little mess on his desk is okay — especially when he’s using it.

When he’s not working or if you’re having guests over to your place, then you need to decide how much the mess truly bothers you. Constantly nagging him to clean up his space can create animosity in your relationship. Would the benefits you gain from his desk being clear in front of guests be worth the anger and frustration that he feels toward you for constantly bothering him about it? You’ll have to weigh both sides and determine which route to take.

Simply put, you can’t force someone to become organized. A person has to choose this way of living for himself. Have you talked to him about why you want his desk to be organized? Has he explained why he prefers it to be disorganized? Would he be okay with being messy sometimes but having a clean-up plan in place for when other people come into your space? Would you be okay with that? Talking about it will likely help you both to better understand how the other person feels.

If you can give a little and be okay with him having some mess on his desk while he’s working or just when the two of you are in the flat, then hopefully he’ll agree to cleaning up his desk when guests come to visit. The two of you can acquire a “>bins or contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.