Martha says…
Six Things to Do Every Day
1. Make the Bed
Tidiness begets tidiness. A crisply made bed makes the whole room seem more orderly, which makes it less likely that you’ll let other things — such as clothes and papers — pile up around it.
2. Manage Clutter
Whenever you leave a room, take a quick look around for anything that isn’t where it should be. Pick it up and put it where it belongs. Insist that everyone in the household do the same.
3. Sort the Mail
Take a few minutes to open, read, and sort mail as soon as you bring it inside. Keep a trash bin near your sorting area for junk mail. Drop other mail into one of four in-boxes: personal correspondence, bills, catalogs, and filing.
4. Clean as You Cook
Instead of filling the sink with pots and dishes, wash them or put them in the dishwasher as you prepare a meal.
5. Wipe Up Spills While They’re Fresh
Whether it’s tomato sauce on the cooktop or makeup on the bathroom counter, almost anything is faster and easier to remove if you attend to it immediately.
6. Sweep the Kitchen Floor
Every evening once you’ve finished washing up after dinner, sweep the floor. This will keep tough-to-clean dirt and grime from building up, which will make the weekly mopping much quicker.
Of course, this all makes sense to me, and if I did it my house would proably feel a lot cleaner than it is… but I am the queen of clutter. I did sort through a bazillion old magazines and catalogs today and toss 95% of them, but I am a “piler”. There are little piles of this and that all over the place here. This is something that I have been working on. I am much better with my piles than I was a year ago and I’m hoping that once I get my studio finished I will be done with the piles for good.
I just thought I’d share a Martha tip (or six) since I didn’t get here to write much of anything today… I will be back in full force tomorrow (I hope) and will have some more layouts, another freebie and some blabber to blab about!
Happy Friday!
April 13th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Oh thank you, I had a sort of sinking feeling when I started reading this post, that you were going to say something like …”and I taught Martha everything she knows…”
You have no idea how much better it makes me feel to know that you’re a piler - I’m a piler too! I fight it vigorously, I declutter at least every other week, and still the piles grow! When we moved halfway across the planet we shed 99.999% of our joint clutter and began afresh. But still it creeps back (though it’s nowhere near as bad as it was, mind you we have a bigger house now, so more places to hide it lol!!). Do you think there’s a support group somewhere? Maybe we should start one!!! Lol!!!
Thank you so much for the latest paperz - some of them remind me of faded but gloriously elegant interiors of some of Dublin’s Victorian and Edwardian houses. Thank you!!
April 13th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Oh I read this too on the Martha site. I am a clutterer and a procrastinator. These things have a habit of overwhelming me. One thing I do still do (a la Flylady) is make sure I go to bed at night with a completely clear and clean sink. It’s so much nicer getting up in the morning not seeing dishes still waiting to be washed, or put away.
April 13th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Thank heaven, I CAN still relate to you after all! I am a major piler as well. I know all the “rules” about keeping things neat and organized and put away; I’ve read FLYLady and SHE and MOTHs and about any other Neatnik Acronyms you can imagine, but NONE of them address the fact that some people are filers and others are pilers! There was one book about that several years ago, but it was too expensive - I kept waiting to be able to get it cheaper, and am STILL waiting! Oh well . . . it would probably just wind up buried under some pile before I could read it anyway, LOL!!
Oh, BTW - thanks again for more awesome freebies!
April 13th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
I’m a piler too. Dangit. I notoriously print recipes and have stacks and stacks of those that I plan to organize and put in books for my “cooking challenged” daughter. To her, seasoning vegetables is to put the water on them in the pan (eyeroll) I stack mail up….and up, and up….and some is over and some is ^up there and some is v back there by the shredder too, patiently waiting for either of two things 1. Me to get it all sorted and file 13′d. OR 2. Me to die and my daughter to have it to do (I’m liking this option more and more each day!) At work though, I’m Mrs Organization. Everything has a place and everything is there.
House cleaning is whole nuther story. Years ago, when I was fresh outta my Mother’s house, I was trained to keep it all clean. I did, I vacuumed 3 times a week, dusted continuously and never had cobwebs anywhere.
Now, since I’m older, I’ve realized that there is more to life than spending all my time cleaning. With my children grown and gone, we’ve replaced them with pets, so I now “trim” the carpet about once a month.
Sweeping the kitchen is a must because that darned persian cat likes to sleep in front of the refrigerator and she is a “hair dropper”….I have clumps of the stuff daily on my kitchen floor. She’s black, the floor is white. That is not very appetizing looking. SO I sweep before cooking every evening out of necessity. I do keep my laundry done, it might stay in the dryer a day or two and another load laying in a basket somewhere, but I’ll get to it when I get to it.
I do wash my dishes as I cook though. I hate cleaning the kitchen, so it seems like it doesn’t take as long to get out of there when I go ahead and
wash ‘em as I go. The dust and spider webs are another story.
I have spider webs everrrrrrrrrrrywhere. My husband says, “Hey, the spiders eat the mosquitos and other assorted flying insects that venture into my home, plus the webs add stability to the corners in which they are built. SO all in all it’s nice to know there are other NON-MARTHAS out there. Makes me feel a tad better.
April 14th, 2007 at 3:37 am
Oh, so you got the newsletter yesterday too, huh? I have to unsubscribe to those things. Everytime I get one, it makes me feel like the worse housekeeper ever.
Christeph’s comment is the funniest! I had a slightly different feeling: oh boy, she really does follow Martha… I have to say that before my son was born I was a subscriber to MSLiving and Real Simple (which has a slightly more relaxed approach). I know what I should do. But all I could do was pile the magazines (can you relate?) and go do something else more interesting.
These days I have a calendar in my kitchen, in which I mark even the simplest tasks, such as clean the hob, clean the cabinet doors, and such. I tackle one or two a day and mark the day for the next cleaning. It’s all over in a few minutes and I’m free to play! The kitchen is never fully clean, but I’ll settle for that…
April 14th, 2007 at 7:28 am
Sharon-shutterbug, if the book was Organizing from the Inside Out, it’s SOMEwhere in my house, buried under a bunch of other stuff. Oops.
I think what I would need to keep a house pristine is a TV show filmed inside my house. I mean, THEN I’d have incentive to clean daily! I bet Martha’s prison cell was a pigsty.
April 14th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Piler here, too! I even make my bed everyday and then use it as a huge flat surface, which I inevitably have to clean off before climbing into bed at night.
April 14th, 2007 at 10:35 am
I see the core group of Pilers Anonymous is growing nicely! I’ll send you all a memo about the opening meeting as soon as I find my notes…I’m sure I put them in one of that stack of notebooks by the pc…or was it somewhere among the cluster of sticky notes on the side of the monitor…or under the collection of de-cluttering magazines on the sofa…???
April 14th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
You guys are so funny. I am not a piler!! but this place is no where near clean. Thanks for the bowz today hope your saturday was good. Iwas out in the backyard with my hubby laying sod. I am tired and sore but i always have energy for scrapbooking!! type to you later!!
April 14th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
“This is the confession of an Australian piler”. I pile bills, junk mail, school newsletters and girl guide newsletters in the kitchen near the kettle
At least there is only one pile in my house but gosh, it takes AGES to find anything in there LOL. The embarrasing thing is that the pile is lying ON TOP of a little filing unit that has neatly inscribed lables for each topic!!! Christeph, you are a laugh! Pilers Anon sounds like a group I’d like to join 
Although I may lose the subscription notice in the pile near the kettle LMAO. Love your blog Anna - and love that you’re a piler too 
April 14th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
if you’re ever feeling bad about being messy, search for an article entitled “Saying Yes to Mess” in the NY Times. Life’s too short to worry that everything is always in its place.
Thank you for the wonderful freebies!
April 14th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
gosh, anna! looks like you scared the stuffing out of half of us with the ‘martha’ crap, lol! i’m a piler and here’s why: i’m a very visual person. i need to see everything. i know where my piles are and i know which pile my stuff is in, but if you move it, i’ll never find it because i can’t ’see’ it anymore. it’s like re-naming a file and not telling the computer. also, because i’m so visual, i’m easily distracted by things i see. so if the stuff i need isn’t out where i see it all the time, i forget about it because there are other things to look at and keep me busy. oddly, my office at work was always meticulously organized; everything had it’s place and was filed and shelved chronologically! why doesn’t that transfer to home?! i have the skills! perhaps we can address that at our PA meeting, lol! thanks for the latest goodies!
:) M
April 15th, 2007 at 12:01 am
Martha has more money than most any of us and probably more than one housekeeper managing her “clutter” daily. She has a house 4-10x bigger than I do at least with corresponding storage and pretty sure it’s been many years since a 4 year old ran through with a melting slurpee (sans lid), not to mention she’s single so no husband to contribute to the chaos.
wouldn’t trade ANYTHING in my life for hers (well maybe she could have the melting slurpee - I don’t want to be selfish!)
April 15th, 2007 at 7:27 am
OMG, I have finally arrived at the mothership!!! In our family we call it “FS3″ —-> FLAT SURFACE STACKER SYNDROME!!! If you look around my house you won’t find a flat surface that is not covered with stacks of very neat piles of crap…. Oh I mean treasures!
All very necessary items to enrich our lives by their very presence!
Each of us stand proud to defend our stacks with testimony of how quickly we can find what we need. —-> But PLEASE don’t challenge us. We’ll tell you that we just don’t function well under that kind of pressure!!!! “It’s my system, don’t mess with it!” LOL Ok, that’s it, clutter central is the home of VERY CREATIVE PEOPLE!!!! Once again thank you Anna for sharing and thanks to all my fellow clutterers for “coming out about clutter”. Now excuse me while I stack these catalogs!!!! LOL - Kristi
April 18th, 2007 at 11:50 am
OMG, not LOL, but absolutely cracking up!!!
Hello, my name is Bridgitt and I am a Piler too.
Never knew there were so many of us! My worst is paper because I never know what to do with it all. I’m a good purger, but then it’s in a pile waiting for a charity drop off.
Have a great week and thanks so much for the bows!
April 20th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
i knew i belonged here. my name is carol and i’m a piler too. my dh promised me that when we got our first computer i could put all my little scraps of paper into it. guess what! i still make notes to myself on scraps of paper. i’m a good purger too, but the house keeps yielding. arrrrrrrghhhhh
and of course i’ve discovered how to pile into the puter- there’s external drives and all those gmail accts
i could go on