Readers Share Their Top House-Neatening Tricks

For most people with attention deficit, a picture-perfect house is an impossible dream — but these <em>ADDitude</em> readers take up the challenge and share how they're succeeding at house cleaning.

Leanne

April 28, 2017 at 7:15 pm

To tidy a room I play a game with myself I call “50 Things”. The goal is to get to 50; I proceed from one number to the next by each single tidying action. Straighten the throw on the sofa: 1. Plump the cushion: 2. Old newspaper in the bin: 3. Groups of things picked up together count as one (such as gathering up a handful of coins or a stack of magazines) but as separate numbers if they are tidied separately. Items that live outside the room being tidied are removed from the room but not actually tidied away: they are just placed inside their correct room on the same floor or taken to a suitable place for onward transit later (like the foot of the stairs if they are to go upstairs). I then return immediately to the room being tidied without distraction and carry on counting. I find I can tidy a room in no time at all this way because the focus is on the counting and not on the tidying. If there are still things to tidy by the time I reach 50 I invariably find I’m in full flow by then and don’t want to stop so I carry on (continuing to count) until the room is done. Every time I see the room starting to get messy I do my counting game.