The 4 Jobs We Call "Cleaning" and Why That's the Problem (Ep 330)

Deanna Yates (0:00)

Hello, my friends. The unpacking saga continues over in our new house here, but I don't want to talk about what I am currently doing. I am definitely going to give you an update on the packing party and the pause method and the traditional decluttering method in another week or so.

But I want to talk about the moment I had a couple weeks ago, when I was standing in this new house.

I was standing in the kitchen.

I guess, let me back up even a little bit more. We moved from a 1969 three-bedroom, two-bath, single-level home. It was old, but it was small and cozy and comfortable, and we had made it into our home. We moved into this home. We fell in love with the first floor. But you've already noticed, I just said first floor. There is an entire second level and we have not lived with stairs in five years. So I wasn't quite ready for what it was going to feel like when we were in this home. The downstairs is perfect. It fits our needs perfectly. It's going to be fantastic when we want to entertain, we want to have parties, we already have ideas in our heads of who we want to have over, and when we want to have parties and things like that.

The kitchen is nice and open and I love it. I love actually getting to cook in it. But I was standing in this kitchen and I realized we have three full bathrooms in this house. The last house had two bathrooms.

And I just had this moment that it just landed. That this house, not only is it bigger than our last one, but it's a lot bigger than our last one. So there's a whole another floor, there's more surfaces, there's more bathrooms, there's more everything. And my first thought was not, wow, look at all this space. And I feel really guilty saying that because most people would be thrilled to have more space. And most people when they talk about decluttering and getting clutter free, they talk about if I just had more space, this would be easier. And yes, of course, it's going to be easier to put my stuff away. But trust me when I say I never want to be in the position I was in when we moved this last time. Now, I know we moved in a week. And so everything was compacted and I was packing everything and moving most of it. And my husband was at a commission with his back surgery. So I know it was a very unique circumstance that I'm sure we will not find ourselves in again. But the amount of stuff I felt like we had, it was overwhelming and I never want to be in that position again. So yes, we have more space. Yes, it's going to be easier to have a lot more margin when we put everything away. But I do not want to add more stuff to our life. We do not need more stuff. So when I say that I was overwhelmed with the amount of space, I really was not sure how I was going to keep up with it all.

Because I talk about clutter for a living, and here I was sitting in my own house, overwhelmed by the idea of cleaning it all, mostly by myself, because while I do try to get my family on board, they're on board with the decluttering and the tidying, but the cleaning, that has mostly fallen to me, and a lot of those are bad habits on my own, and not setting the expectation and not really asking for participation and just getting busy with life, right? So I know a lot of that are things that I need to get better at, but I just sat with this for a few days, and I looked around this house and I thought, okay, I'm not gonna let this house win. I'm not gonna be overwhelmed. I love this house, and so I wanna make sure it works for our family.

And so I figured out that I wasn't behind on anything.

I had actually been treating four completely different jobs like they were one job. And so that is what today's is all about. I'm gonna talk about those four different jobs, what their purpose actually is, how we can separate them so we don't feel so overwhelmed, and what I'm doing in my life to make sure that I can actually keep up on all of it. All right, I'm Deanna Yates. You are listening to episode 330 of the Wannabe Clutter Free podcast. I am so excited you are here. If you are not subscribed, please make sure you do so because I'm constantly sending out amazing episodes. I've got some great guests that I'm trying to get lined up for the rest of this year for you and some really good episodes plans. So make sure you don't miss out on that. If you want the show notes for today, you can get them in the podcast player you're listening to this at or on. Or you can go to wannabeclutterfree.com/330 where I will always have more additional resources for you as well. Okay, so let's get into it. Let's talk about those four jobs. Because most of us will stop and say, I need to clean my house. My house is such a mess. I could just get it clean, right? But what we really mean is all four things at once. And those four things are decluttering, tidying, cleaning, and organizing. Each of those is a different job and a different task. So when we combine them all, when we say, my house is such a mess, there are four different things that we could be talking about. And so it's no wonder why we don't feel finished or we feel overwhelmed or we feel like there's too much to do. It's because we're trying to do too much at once. So let's define them here and now so that we can start to break them apart and see how they fit into our everyday life and how they fit into our homes. Okay? So decluttering is the act of deciding what leaves your house.