When your house is really a mess, it can be very difficult to find the motivation to clean up. You have a lot of dirty dishes, the floor is full of clothes and your table is full of papers. It’s all quite overwhelming. But we have the solution: the ‘five things’ method. Here’s what you need to know about it.
What is the Five Things Method?
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the junk in your house, it’s good to remember that you can always divide the junk into five categories. The categories are: waste, dishes, laundry, things that have a place, things that don’t have a place. If you tackle these categories one at a time, cleaning up will feel a lot less overwhelming.
This is how you perform the method
Here’s how you can use the categories to make cleaning up feel less overwhelming. Start by grabbing a garbage bag and going around your house looking for loose trash. Think of empty packaging, receipts and other pieces of waste. Leave the waste bag at the front door as soon as you are finished. Now you can move on to the next category: dishes. Go through your house again and collect all used mugs, glasses and other dishes. Place all this in the sink. Now you can move on to the laundry. Make the rounds again and throw all the dirty clothes in the laundry basket. You don’t have to do these chores right away. The point of this method is that you first make your home less cluttered.
Once all the trash, dishes, and dirty laundry are out of the way, you can start putting away things that have a permanent place. So these are the things that belong somewhere, but are in the wrong place. Put your books back on the bookshelf, the kids’ toys in the right bin and your shoes on the shoe rack. Now you can collect the things that have no place. You can now choose to give these things a place. But if this seems like too much of a task, you can also put them in a container for later. Once you have finished this, you can choose to take out the trash, do the dishes or start doing the laundry.
Why the method works
The idea behind the method is that it takes away the stress of making choices while tidying up. This stress arises when you pick up each object individually to think about what to do with it. This method creates more peace in your mind and cleaning up does not feel so overwhelming. You set multiple, smaller goals for yourself, which makes achieving the end goal seem more feasible. So give it a try when your house is a mess!
