All or nothing

As a general rule, I have two speeds - frenetic and stationary. Momentum easily overwhelms me - if I'm doing nothing, I find it hard to get started, but equally once I'm up to speed I struggle to slow down.

This generates a number of challenges - it affects my sleep because if I'm active late in the evening, I struggle to stop and wind down, or alternatively if I'm inactive I don't really feel tired because I've done pretty much nothing.

It also means that I struggle to maintain routines - I let the dirt build until I go on a cleaning frenzy (known as a 'Monica moment'). I would so much rather get the housework done gradually, so the house is never a tip but never spotless and I feel generally positive.

This morning my boyfriend and I were very busy and productive. We took apart the toilet to find out why water was constantly draining into the toilet bowl, and have managed to both identify and partially fix the problem without forking out any money. He replaced the toilet seat. I cleaned the bath tub (oh boy did it need a clean).We cleared out our basement and chucked quite a bit of stuff.

When we got back up to the flat, I sat down and started pondering the bookshelves in the spare room. My boyfriend had to intercede and remind me that we need down time too - that weekends are good at getting things done but should also involve time to soak in the bath, read a book and generally relax.

I'm wondering about trying to do just one thing a day for the housework - no particular order at first, just to get into the habit of doing something when I come in from work. I did once embark on an elaborate cleaning routine and it lasted several weeks before it collapsed. But when I started decluttering, the one-a-day approach really helped me.

Do you have any favourite tips for building up a routine to stay on top of housework?

The everyday matters

I wanted to share a really cool project which Cheryl over at Time to Craft is doing.

Inspired by a 1922 competition which invited farmer's wives to write letters to their imaginary daughters, each accompanied by a square for a patchwork quilt, Cheryl is composing a series of letters to her daughter as she builds a quilt patch by patch. I've really enjoyed her first two letters (here and here) and the thoughts they have prompted.

The discussions around wearing make up and doing homework seem to me to be about much bigger questions - being yourself, deciding who that is, laying the groundwork for your future. These are subjects as worthy of consideration at 21 or 101 as at 11. And what I particularly like about Cheryl's approach is how she uses these everyday examples.

We all choose to be who we are every day, and every day that changes slightly. On the one hand, that's fantastic. We grow and evolve and learn and change - how boring if we were all the exact same people at 50 that we were at 15 - and the decisions we make each day can inform the next day, and so on.

On the other hand, it means that it is very easy to find yourself someone you never meant to be because of little things that seem not to matter at the time. Whether that's reaching for the cookie jar (yes folks I broke my no-chocolate-cookies-streak) or allowing work to slowly erode your free time (ahem), or how you handle stress or conflict or frustration, the little decisions matter.

The little repetitive actions that we make the time to do - washing up or doing exercise or spending time with loved ones or blogging - not only reveal our priorities but reinforce them, and choosing to repeat something or avoid it changes the role it plays in our lives. I think many of us are evaluating this - if I say my family comes first, but they only get a few hours a week of my time, is that really accurate? Am I, in fact, kidding myself?

I've been thinking a lot recently at work around ethics - while we have to comply with various rules and guidelines about how we represent our clients or approach certain stakeholders (basically if we're paid by company x, we have to be open and transparent about it), I'm increasingly aware that actually my actions and my reputation are my own concern and responsibility, and while being compliant with the set requirements, even in my everyday phone calls I am considering how my own standards compare, and beginning to ensure that I satisfy my own as well as my clients' standards.

That should seem like an obvious thing to do, but it's very easy to follow the standard in place without thinking about whether it's the right one for me. And not with big gestures - I'm not speaking to the press or the President or anything - but I am realising that my every day emails and every day phone calls add up to a sum greater than the parts and I want to be damn sure I feel comfortable with what that sum looks like.

The same applies to other areas of my life. I think of myself as a simple/slow living advocate, but as my recent work habits show, that's not really accurate. I think of myself as someone healthy who takes care of herself, but I rarely excercise and eat more biscuits than I should. That doesn't mean I should beat myself up about it, but be honest with myself and try to make time for the small daily tasks that reflect and reinforce who I want to be.

So who do I want to be tomorrow? I'm not totally sure, but I think that asking the question is far more important than finding a conclusive answer.

Reflections on January 2014

For the last year or two, I have tried as regularly as possible to join in the Slow Living Month by Month series, started by Christine over at Slow Living Essentials. It's definitely a good tool to reflect on what I've done each month and remind myself of many areas where I don't do as much as I'd like.

However, I do feel that there are two or three key challenges which are becoming major themes in my journey, in this blog, and it would be good to take a moment to reflect on those separately and more informally.

So, January. First month of the year, traditionally a time for much-touted new beginnings and overambitious resolutions which last all of three days. I can't even remember what my resolutions were, but I am definitely feeling more purposeful in general, more on-track in terms of where I want to be, and also more content with where I am now, accepting that life is a journey.

Clutter - Living well with less

One of the biggest changes this month is that I have started Project 333. For the uninitiated, this essentially means putting 80% of my clothes and shoes in the basement, and living with 33 items of shoes and clothing for three months. I was a little nervous, and thought I might end up recycling the same few outfits on endless loop, constantly running out of clothes and stressing about the laundry. 

In fact, I'm loving it. I'm wearing loads of variations that I've never worn before, and have started to receive compliments on my clothes/outfit at least once a week from friends and colleagues, which is definitely new. Caring for my clothes becomes less daunting, with fewer of them to worry about, so I no longer scrunch worn clothes into a ball at the back of the cupboard. Clothes clean enough to be re-worn are hung up or folded. Clean clothes are ironed. Shoes are polished and waterproofed. Damages are repaired. It's all just much more manageable, and much less work. I'm even doing fewer loads of laundry.

It's also making me rethink how I approach my clothes, and I'm very slowly starting to improve my wardrobe - so the clothes are better fitting, more colourful and just more of an expression of me and my life. I'm already mentally preparing to let quite of lot of the clothes in storage go when I change them around in April.

Routines - Making housework easy

This month I've been holding back on urges to be ambitious and plan lots of routines. I'm focusing on allowing new habits to evolve however and wherever is easiest. Basically, the stuff I do that has an immediate positive feedback gets repeated, until it sticks. Taking more care with my clothes, it seemed the next thing to do to set out an outfit for the next day every evening. Doing the washing up in the morning before going to work makes the evening's pile less daunting, makes a more pleasant kitchen for my boyfriend to bake in, and offers me a moment of domesticity before work. 

The latest evolution is an extension of that. I got sick of the dirty floor one evening last week and cleaned it. And it was so lovely I wanted to keep it that way, so I've started sweeping the kitchen floor each morning as well. It takes me about three minutes but it makes such a noticeable difference. But I'm trying to be careful not to add to this - I want to give myself time for each new habit to become normal.

Self-discipline - Resisting temptation

I do struggle to motivate myself to not eat the chocolate bar, to go for a run, to get off the sofa and do the hoovering, to pay the bill that came in the post. I'm trying to improve my self-discpline in general, and finding that at the moment it really comes down to food and sport.

 

Basically, when I eat fruit salad and yoghurt for breakfast, I have MILES more energy and mental clarity during the day than just about anything else. Ditto for having a soup or salad for lunch, rather than a sandwich, and ditto again for snacking on fruit, vegetables and nuts through the day rather than less healthy options. It sounds sickeningly healthy and I'm not yet sticking to it everyday but it makes a very obvious difference to how I feel and thus on every other part of my life. My big achievement this month is that I HAVE NOT EATEN A SINGLE CHOCOLATE CHIP BISCUIT ALL MONTH. (NB this does not also apply to other kinds of biscuit, but I'm still going to celebrate it as an achievement.

The same goes for sport. If I get out for a run, I feel so much better afterwards, and yet it's still a struggle to motivate myself. A job with long hours is too easy an excuse not to do sport, and the same goes for the swimming pool's opening hours, the terrible weather outside, a sore back etc. I've done a little better this month than some, but I'm still not close to where I want to be (half an hour, five days a week).

Organic routines

I have recently been mulling over the commonalities across the individual and unique simple lives - mine and those I see in my geographic and virtual community. I think routines is probably one of them. Whether it's a routine for milking your goat, a routine for baking bread, a routine for getting yourselves out of the house in the morning, we all have routines.

I've made several attempts in recent years to develop my routines to encompass more of the activities I want to undertake. Ideally - in the fantasy life in my head - my routines cover all aspects of housework, cleaning and maintenance, as well as my own health and wellbeing. I go running, I mop the floors, and it all happens easily and almost invisibly because it's routine.

As anyone struggling with self-discipline will know, anything that is already routine is SO MUCH EASIER than pushing yourself to do something out of the ordinary. I want to bring more activities into this.

However, I've made several attempts to 'construct' routines. Last spring, I sat down, listed all the jobs that need to be done on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis and divided them up, breaking them into one thing a day throughout the year. It was beautiful and balanced and it lasted about three weeks before it just fizzled out. It was too much too quickly.

Last autumn, I tried again with something smaller. I tried adding one small task - wiping down the bathroom sink - to my morning routine. That also lasted about three weeks before it just fizzled out.

This month, something rather unexpected has happened. Rather than setting out intentionally to add something to my routine, something has just, well, fallen into it. I've started washing up the breakfast dishes before I leave the house. Haphazardly. I wasn't setting out to do it, I wasn't planning a New Year's routine change. It was something I just happened to do on my first day back at work this year - no particular reason, it just occurred to me to do it, as I was running a little early for once and looking for something little to do in that time - and somehow I've kept on doing it.

It's teeny tiny but is having a rather welcome impact on my life. It means I go to work feeling already ahead with the day, feeling in control, feeling good about having achieved something, even something so pathetically small. It means the washing up after dinner in the evenings is less work, which in turn means I procrastinate about it less, do it earlier and have more enjoyable evenings. I suspect it makes for a cleaner, more pleasant kitchen for my boyfriend to cook in because he's even done a bit of evening baking (normally reserved for the weekends.)

It also means I get to do something domestic in the morning. To be honest, and I can't believe I'm saying this, I am starting to find washing up rather relaxing. It's slow. It's meditative. As I wipe the bowls and put them back in the cupboard, I can look out on the balcony at the early morning sunshine and think where I am going to put the herb pot, I look around the tidy kitchen and feel good about the newly oiled chopping board all warm and golden. It gives me a moment of slow and simple living before my mental space and energies are drawn into my job.

I'm not stressing about this. I hope it stays but I'm not going to push myself. I'm now at just about the three week mark, so this might also fizzle out, but I hope it doesn't. I wonder if there are any more habits which might just naturally fall into place? I rather like the idea of organic routine-building, each new leaf gradually unfurling one by one, and no clear idea where the next will be.

Do you have any preferred methods for adapting and building routines?

Building habits

Welcome to everyone who's stopped by from Rhonda's blog at Down to Earth! Thanks for visiting. I hope you enjoy some of my ramblings about trying to live a simpler, slower life whilst working in the hubbub of European policymaking in Brussels, Belgium.

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Do you know what's weird? 

A year ago, doing the washing up was a HUGE hassle. I'd set up my laptop on a nearby surface to have something on in the background - an old period drama on youtube or a music playlist. I'd put it off until the last minute, which meant going to bed really really late. It always seemed such a bummer and it would take me thirty, sometimes forty minutes.

Now? Washing up takes me ten minutes, fifteen tops, and I barely notice it. It feels more like two. I don't even need to think, I just do the washing up and then I can cuddle up on the sofa under a blanket and unwind from the day. No distractions, no (or less!) procrastination.

When something is habitual, it doesn't take willpower to do it. This is why my kitchen surfaces are always beautifully clean - I wipe down surfaces every evening after I do the washing up - but my bathroom isn't - I rarely push myself to scrub the bath-tub.

So this month I've set about learning a habit. I really like Leo Babauta's guide. Don't be too ambitious, make it impossible to fail. My new habit is to wipe down the bathroom surfaces every morning just after I have brushed and pinned my hair. It's super easy, three minutes. And guess what, it gets easier - if I wiped a surface yesterday, it doesn't often acquire major grime over a 24-hour period, and it's super easy to wipe it today. So easy that I end up wiping down some nearby tiles or the edge of the bathtub or the mirrors most mornings. Weirdly, by telling myself I only have to wipe the sink, in reality I'm cleaning half the bathroom daily, whereas if I tell myself to clean half the bathroom, realistically I won't even wipe the sink.

So I'm looking forward to the point when the habit is so ingrained and the bathroom so clean that it will always be sparkly and, like the washing up, I'll barely notice cleaning it.

Slow and Steady: Building routines

I've always been more of a hare than a toirtoise when it comes to cleaning and household maintenance. I let everything build up for weeks, months, while moping and feeling down. Then I have a blitz, when I try to do everything all at once. My boyfriend describes these days as me 'having a Monica moment', after the Friends character.

 

Bloggers like Rhonda at Down to Earth or El at A Thrifty Mrs speak about how routines help them keep control of their homes, and of course you can't mention routine-building without referring to Fly Lady. I've been reading these and similar blogs for a while, wanting to build a routine and not really sure how to start.

A few weeks ago, I realised that, almost without noticing, I had built up a small routine. I had been more reliable at doing the washing up every day, and from there it was a small step to dry and put away the dishes. And then it was so easy, with the surfaces clear, to wipe and dry them. And then it just made sense to wipe the sink and splashback tiles while I was at it. So without realising, I have built up the beginnings of a routine which means my kitchen is always usually tidy and clean, a welcoming space to cook or bake.

Week 1: Laying out clothes

Last Saturday I decided to make a change to my routine to make it easier, and over the week I mulled over this topic, ending up not with hot spiced wine but with a more developed challenge to myself - to make one change a week to simplify my home and my life, focusing particularly on those aspects of the simple life  philosophy which I find difficult, such as routine, organisation, decluttering and time management.

I'm calling this challenge the Simples challenge. For week one, I decided to lay out my clothes each evening for the following day. I've tried it before, but always left it too late into the evening. Now I am doing this as soon as I get home from work, when I get changed into jeans and a t-shirt (or civvies, as we used to call them at school).

My work clothes are laid out over the arm on the left, and my running kit on the seat.

Simples: a simple living challenge

Since I started this blog, I've been on a journey. The focus has shifted slightly but significantly.

When I started writing, I wanted to live an eco-friendly lifestyle. But I quickly found that as soon as any conflict arose, I abandoned by alleged green principles. Green is awesome, but I wasn't about to turn down an invitation to spend a month in Argentina with my boyfriend to meet his parents and his friends. Plus I love hot baths too much.

Start as you mean to go on

Best way to start the weekend, methinks? Meringues that have been in the oven overnight, and a pot of fresh coffee. I feel so decadent! Let's hope this continues.

I have been mulling recently about building routines that work for me.

I have observed a pattern in my behaviour, when it comes to keeping my space (both home and work) tidy, organised and clean. I have a period of enthusiasm lasting maybe 2 weeks to one month, in which I keep everything immaculate and find endless energy for sorting old piles and tackling odd jobs that build up.

This is followed by a period of one to two months of sloth and lethargy, when I can see that the floor needs to be hoovered and my intray at work piles higher and higher, but for some reason I let it get on top of me.