Week 1 with the Flylady

Last week I started the whole FlyLady thing. On Thursday I shined my kitchen sink like it has never been shined before. And it made me happy:)

So one week of babysteps is down. Thoughts...

I LOVE this. I'm not even doing all of the stuff that comes via email, but I love the mindset I now have. Set the timer for 15 minutes and take a chunk out of something. Set it for 2 minutes and clean a hot spot (definitely needed that and it felt so good to have that done). Load of laundry every day... that will be a huge thing for me.

Over the weekend I washed and dried 3 loads of laundry - but I don't fold over the weekend. By Monday I had two more loads to wash and dry... by the afternoon I had 5 loads of laundry to fold and put away in addition to wanting to catch up on my ironing. So I spent the ENTIRE day doing laundry on Monday. It was fine - I really don't mind laundry and I enjoy ironing. However, enough is enough:) All of my running clothes were in the wash at that point, so that morning I had to dig through the clean clothes to find some running clothes. I have always stayed on top of my laundry to the point where I don't need to dig through the clean clothes for anyone ever, but Monday morning I did and that sucks. So I conquered it all and am now down with the 1 load every day keeps the CHAOS away (I started yesterday because I didn't have enough to do a load on Tuesday after having done everything on Monday). So yesterday afternoon I folded ONE load of laundry and put ONE load of laundry away. So much less overwhelming. So much faster (the load was also smaller). I'm digging this.

And my sink. At first I was almost obssessive over keeping it shining. Like Dave should really consider rinsing his dishes somewhere else obssessive. But I've eased up. I've realized that the sink needs to be used throughout the day and I just need to shine it before bed. But I love the fact that the sun reflects off of the faucet and almost blinds me now - love the sun, first of all, and love the clean, shiney faucet.

Tuesday I brought some laundry baskets and a garbage can into the basement, set the timer for 15 minutes and began decluttering the toys. I'm becoming more and more of a firm believer in fewer options = better (which I actually just read a study* on and its true), so I went down there with a mission and no mercy. After 15 minutes I came upstairs with half of a garbage can to throw away and a 13 gallon bag of toys to be given away. And the basement is still a mess and there are still many more toys to go through. Knowing that I only needed to spend 15 minutes doing it made the task so much less overwhelming - and gave me permission to leave the mess as it was when the 15 minutes were over.

Yesterday I set the timer for 15 minutes and I decluttered and cleaned the girls desk/coloring area. I ended up with a huge pile of finished coloring books that were ready to be thrown away, which makes the entire spot look better. Again, 15 minutes made the task less overwhelming and gave me motivation to actually tackle it. Looking at it prior to flylady, I would think it would take the better part of an hour and opt to leave it as it was - I never would have guessed that I could do the entire thing in less than 15 minutes.

So FlyLady... totally digging her. Today, I begin creating my control journal (and I'm using graph paper because it makes me really, really happy:)


* study was cited in Malcom Gladwell's book, Blink. Researchers designed an experiment where they put tables with samples of high end jelly in a grocery store to see if the number of samples would increase or prohibit sales of jelly. When the tables had 6 samples, sales were higher. When the tables had 24 samples people seemed to get overwhelmed and didn't buy any.