Messy Monday: Take It One Foot at a Time

If you look around and are overwhelmed by the amount of clutter everywhere and wonder how you’ll ever dig yourself out, take it one foot at a time. Literally. Or if your home is usually pretty tidy but there are a few places requiring more focused work, break your work into square foot chunks. Concentrate your effort in one square foot of space at a time. If the immediate square foot you’re looking at is clean (let’s say your dresser), you can expand your radius to find a section of square footage awaiting your work!

This tip really helps me because sometimes a large area with many items out of place (for example, my kitchen counter) can overwhelm me. I feel like I don’t know where exactly on the counter to start; and if I picked a place, how much do I do before I need to stop due to time or pressing demands like changing diapers, stopping squabbles, wiping up spilled drinks, and more? It is very easy for me to lose my focus and do a little here and there without finishing the “big” project. Consequently, it’s never done. Not even one square foot of it is ever fully clean (usually).

So breaking cleaning up into small chunks of one square foot at a time is very helpful for me. It’s fairly quick. It’s a small enough chunk I can keep my focus. Once it’s done, I feel successful and am more inspired to move on to the next square foot, and the next, and the next, and so on. Taking it one foot at a time is very doable. Now I just need to go do it!