Cutting Down Time-Spending for an Organized Life

Honestly, I could spend all day reading and writing. When I was a kid and had no pressing responsibilities, it wasn't uncommon to see me in bed all day reading two or three books without getting up for anything but the bathroom. Ask my mother, it was difficult enough to get me to stop reading to eat.

Now that I've added writing and blogging to my literary fun, there are days when my house just crumbles around me, but just like those childhood days, it's...just...so...hard...to...stop.

I've heard of Flylady and other such plans, but anytime I go to those sites, I am overwhelmed by the amount of reading just to figure out the system. (Funny, I like reading, just not about stuff I don't want to do.) I actually like being organized, but I have this aversion to organizing my house chores. And not sure I would keep up with it anyway if it wasn't super simple.

So, I have made a simple flexible chart to help me keep up with what I should do.

House Cleaning	House Maintenance
bathrooms	sewing
kitchen	organizing spaces
utility room	house construction/repair
upstairs	bills
downstairs	weekly food preparation
outdoors	outdoor maintenance

So, I have six days of separate projects. I have to do one from each category before I allow myself to do my fun stuff. The other work of the house I am pretty good at making myself do consistently, these things however I don't do so well at.

Cleaning the house and house maintenance stuff I used to do in spurts wither when I couldn't stand it anymore, or when I got really interested in doing it. With this chart, I can pick what I do. Maybe one week the kitchen really needs the refrigerator clean, so I pick up and clean the fridge. But the next week, the kitchen pantry needs organized, so that week I do that and general pick up in the kitchen. Whatever seems most crucial in that area when I attack it.

I can do these in any order and let's say I am really eager to get back to my book one day and cleaning the bathrooms is really easy but the upstairs isn't, I'll choose the bathrooms on that day, etc. The key is I have to do something in every one of these areas each week, except Sunday.

Not sure this is "frugal" in the literal sense, but I thought I would share how I am trying to force myself to scale down my expensive time habit of reading and writing to do the things I ignore best. It's worked for 2 weeks so far, hopefully I can keep it up.