My One Minute Rule

The truth is, I am messy. I love when my home is tidy and picked up. Unfortunately, due to mom life and partially because I just don’t give a care, my house is oftentimes very messy. If you are a mom, or maybe an adult in general, you know the nuisance of those piddly little tasks you must complete in order to keep up with your household. You know, like the shoes that get thrown into a pile at the door instead of brought back to the closest. Or how about the dishes that inevitably stack up in the sink? Or the random stack of who knows what that is laying on the counter completely homeless. Maybe you can relate, or maybe this is just my household and I’m a poor housekeeper. I keep telling my husband we need to fire our housekeeper but it’s pretty hard to do when you are the housekeeper! The kinds of tasks I’m talking about are the ones we tell ourselves we will do later because they only take a minute. Then they get left undone and continue to build on top of one another. Pretty soon you have an overflowing sink, messy counters, and enough shoes at the door to adorn a small army. I learned a little trick to help ward off this chaos. While I’m not perfect at following this rule, it sure has seemed to help a little! I’m sure with time it will become easier and easier!

It’s called the, “One Minute Rule,” first introduced to me by Gretchen Rubin. Simply put, if a task is going to take you one minute or less, you do it right then, NO EXCUSES! Okay, so maybe it can be excused if your toddler is insisting they have to pee RIGHT NOW, but otherwise, no excuses- HA! This means, when I finish a meal, the dishes go directly into the dishwasher, not set into the sink. This means that the table that needs wiping gets wiped off right away, not approached once it’s crusted over. That means the clothes in a pile on your bedroom floor get walked to the hamper and the coat I take off, gets hung directly on to the coat rack.

It’s such a simple rule that it almost seems silly. But when you imagine all of those tasks done versus undone, I bet you can just picture the difference it makes in the tidiness of your home! It also seems like it would be very easy to implement, but I will also admit that procrastination is the devil on my shoulder, 99% of the time. I like to put things off until the last minute so it’s easy for me to push these tasks off to the side and not follow this rule. When I do follow it, my household runs entirely more efficiently, is far tidier, and honestly brings me less anxiety because there isn’t a bunch of clutter distracting me from more important things. Another major plus is that when it’s time for the kiddos to lay down, I’m not consumed with a number of small tasks to complete during that time. I have more time to do what I want!

Have you tried the one minute rule before? Is this something you will implement in your daily routine?

- Kassidy K.