How I learned to (sort of) manage housework
At 37 years young, I developed a routine for housework and managed to stick with it. This might not seem like a big deal for many of you, but it has always been a big struggle for me: the clothes piling up unwashed, heaps of stuff in every corner gathering a film of dust, the whole thing just building up into something so huge that I couldn’t face it. Many times I tried to deal with the mess, got everything clean and tidy, and vowed that it wouldn’t get bad again, but somehow it always did. Part of the issue was that I didn’t even notice the mess until I started tripping over things or finding it hard to find stuff that I needed: I was so caught up in whatever else was going on in my life that I didn’t really see it. Seeing is a lot of the battle.
I’ve now been managing with my routine for nearly two years, so it seems to have stuck this time. My house will never be a pristine show home – there’s a certain amount of mess, and sometimes things build up a little, but I now don’t reach the point where it all feels out of control and I feel ashamed of it.
I don’t normally share this kind of stuff, because of the gender stereotypes associated with sharing household cleaning tips on social media. It’s also a weird kind of thing to put on a philosophical tutoring/proofreading blog, but I thought I’d make an exception this time, since I know that I have friends who have the same problems that I do.
Below I will share what worked for me, but your experience might be different.
- Dirt Doesn’t Matter
The first, and most important, part of the battle was dealing with my own self-defeating and self-critical feelings about mess and dirt. The thing to remember is that despite the messages that you get from all over the place, BEING MESSY DOES NOT MAKE YOU A BAD PERSON. For some people this might be an ethical issue in the broadest sense-that having your crap in order can be part of a flourishing life-but it is certainly not a moral issue (there is very little out there on Aristotelian virtue ethics and household cleaning. Perhaps that should be remedied).
Messy people are not lazy, uncaring or dissolute: they are very often quite the opposite. I thought I knew this – I had recognised it intellectually, but the more progress I made with developing a housework routine, the more I discovered that what had held me back was the mean voice in my head that parroted stuff I didn’t really believe about what a terrible person I was. I’ll say a little more about that voice later.
There is shame involved in this, and shame is one of the most demotivating things there is: shame keeps people stuck in cycles of self-damaging behaviour of all kinds. Not everyone feels like this: the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe was asked how she managed to hold together her astonishing academic career while caring for a vast brood of children (I wonder if any male philosophers have ever been asked about this). She replied “You just have to realise that dirt doesn’t matter.” Her home was famously filthy, and she had a constant stream of student and academic guests round without batting an eye. In a sense, she was right: dirt doesn’t sully your soul – it isn’t the thing that determines whether your life was a success.
Still, for some of us it makes us anxious, and makes our lives generally more miserable and inconvenient. If you, like me, feel this way, you can develop strategies for dealing with it, but in the end those strategies are more likely to succeed if you remember Anscombe’s attitude. Dirt doesn’t matter.
2. Create a routine, but be flexible
If there’s one thing that you can learn from Aristotle, it’s that habits of thinking, feeling and acting only become graceful and natural after putting in a bit of groundwork, and this groundwork can sometimes feel irritating and clunky.
I made a list, well, actually several lists: things that I needed to do every day (e.g. emptying the compost bin, wiping kitchen surfaces), things that I needed to do once a week (properly clean a particular room), things that I needed to do once a month (dusting ceilings for cobwebs, clearing out and cleaning the fridge, etc.), and things that I needed to do every year (clear out the understair cupboard, clean or replace light fixtures, shampoo carpets, etc.)
Once I had those lists, I assigned days to the weekly tasks (with Wednesday free for the monthly task) and weeks of the month (1-3) for the monthly tasks, with the fourth Wednesday free for an annual task, some other random thing that needed doing, or just giving myself a break. Weekends were left without any tasks assigned.
I have daily to-do lists with work tasks that I keep in a notebook. I make all the lists for the whole of the next week on a Friday. That allows me to close the notebook on a Friday afternoon and let chaos reign for the weekend. If you’re like me, disciplined routines can be hard work, so it’s important to give yourself some time to be your ungoverned spontaneous self.
Once we had decided which tasks I would do, and which would be jobs for my husband, I started adding all my housework tasks for each day to the daily to-do list. Ticking them off gives me a nice little buzz. It’s important to include some tasks that take very minimal time or effort, so that you have something to congratulate yourself for even on the hardest days.
If something comes up on a particular day, you can shift things about – just move them to a different day, or cross them off if you decide they don’t matter all that much. Dealing with the whole list is much more important than completing it – dealing with it can mean rescheduling items, abandoning them because they aren’t important, or doing them. If you keep rescheduling something, this might be something you’re a bit anxious about, so ask yourself why and think about what changes you can make. If something gets crossed off almost every time, maybe it doesn’t actually matter and shouldn’t go on your lists anymore.
The important thing for me is to make the lists and keep looking at them, so that I am consciously addressing what I need to do, rather than putting it out of my mind and letting the anxiety fester in the background. Even if an entire list is either crossed out or rescheduled for other (specific) days, that is an achievement, because I am facing stuff and have thought about it. Even with this, you can give yourself a pass and not look at it if you are ill or overcome by major life circumstances, but make sure you always come back to the system and pick up where you left off.
The main points here are (1) that this is about developing habits, which takes a long time. It can feel awkward and annoying at first, but the more you do it, and return to the routine if you fall off the wagon, the more it gets built into your general way of living, and (2) it’s as much about a way of looking as it is about what you actively do. If you make it a habit to see your space in an attentive way, action will often follow pretty naturally. Sometimes now I even clean and tidy stuff without looking at a list!
3. Rome wasn’t cleaned in a day
One mistake I always used to make was having a huge spring clean that would burn me out, so that I didn’t want to do any other housework for at least a week. I found that things got better when I realised that the task ‘clean living room’ didn’t necessarily mean that I would have a pristine living room at the end of it. To begin with I just set the aim of getting it a little more clean and ordered than it was the last time that I did it, and gradually things improved.
I set time limits on it so that I didn’t waste too much of my life on something as inconsequential as wandering around with a microfibre cloth.
4. Audiobooks
A kitchen gets cleaned much more easily if Oliver Sacks is saying interesting things to you about the peculiar functioning of the human brain while you are doing it.
5. A job can be worth doing without being worth doing well
Today is Thursday. Thursday is kitchen cleaning day, but I really wasn’t feeling it. I spent 5-10 minutes doing superficial tidying and then ran a cloth over the surfaces. While doing that, I saw various things that would take a bit more time and effort to clean properly. I have seen them and I am aware of them – those will get done on a different, more energetic, Thursday.
Some days completing the task can be pretty much a symbolic gesture. If you do a really crap job of one of your scheduled tasks, you have still done it – tick!
6. Be your own judge and legislator, but sometimes you can make-believe that you aren’t
We have a robot vacuum cleaner. He is stupid but keen to please. He needs to get his exercise by vacuuming once a day (alternating upstairs and downstairs). I need to clear the floor to stop him getting tangled in things and eating stuff he shouldn’t. Obviously my duty to this machine is purely imaginary, but pretending that I have this stupid but endearing pet is helpful and fun.
One of my daily tasks is a ’10 minute tidy’. I set a timer on my phone and run around like the clappers getting everything looking more or less straight. You know that accusing moralistic critical voice that I mentioned? I’ve turned her into an imaginary judgmental relative who has announced that she will be coming to visit in 10 minutes time: I don’t really care what she thinks, but I want a share of the inheritance. I get to mock that critical inner voice, but still put it to a useful purpose.
Both of these externalised characters – the stupid but friendly assistant and the picky relative – allow me to view my space from a different perspective. Have you had the experience where you are about to have a visitor at short notice and suddenly you start seeing things that you haven’t seen before? It’s that kind of shift in perception that does the work here.
7. Conclusion
There are plenty more things that I could share here: specific stuff about how to get that ring of grime off the inside of the bath, or how to sort and put away laundry with minimal time and effort, but there are a million YouTube videos on all that stuff. These are the things that helped me get into a space where doing all those little specific things even became possible. I hope some of it might be helpful to you too.
Flourishing Philosophy 