On the first reusable sticker sheet of our Adult Chore Charts, you'll find seven "Reset" stickers for various rooms in your house. We were first introduced to the concept of the "Room Reset" by KC Davis, one of our partners and author of the book "How to Keep House While Drowning," though the concept has been around for quite awhile. The idea is that by tidying a room at the end of the day, it's "reset" for the next day (and is a kindness to your future self).
We love how KC approaches this in a fresh way, and one of our favorite concepts is KC's idea that there are only five things in any messy room, no matter how messy it looks:
- Trash
- Dishes
- Laundry
- Things that have a place and are not in their place
- Things that do not have a place
When you organize "clean up" time around addressing each of these in turn, suddenly an enormous job is far more approachable.
We often think about tasks as having a "right" and a "wrong" way to get done. Those of us who don't struggle with executive functioning may think we're doing something simple ("just clean as you go!"), but for other people, that advice is downright impossible to implement. But that doesn't mean all hope is lost — in fact, we've created a lot of tools, including our Clutter Buster, to help with this.
In reality, there are many ways to make accommodations and modifications to your home based on the needs of your family. Visual charts like this are one, but there are many more. KC's book is fabulous for this.
For example, try putting your condiments in your fridge's produce drawers, and your produce in the doors (where it's less likely to be forgotten).