Kicking Laundry's Ass

I did it. All of my laundry will now fit easily into four baskets. Not that I have the space in my closets, drawers and cupboards to fit it all, but I'll be dealing with that issue with my decluttering goal. As a reward to myself, I'm going to clean my laundry room from top to bottom until it sparkles. Cleaning something would normally be the furthest thing from a reward for me that I could possibly think of, but cleaning is actually kind of fun when you don't have to clean around a whole bunch of shit all the time.

I learned a few things from achieving this goal. I learned that every member of my family owns an astonishingly large number of socks. That someone really isn't sneaking in and stealing my favorite clothing items that I haven't seen in months. That my kids are capable of finding household entertainment that doesn't include jumping from the top of the laundry mountain. And most importantly, I found it is easy to become increasingly motivated to achieve a goal when you can see the progress with your own eyes.

For some reason, I've tackled the laundry goal a lot more aggressively than my decluttering or my saving/debt-payoff goal. The reason is because I could easily see my progress. First it was seeing the laundry mountain shrink to the point where I could open my bedroom door the entire way. We used to have to squeeze through sideways. Then I could see that all of the dirty laundry in my bedroom fit in one basket. Then I eliminated one of the two huge garbage bags of dirty sheets and towels. Then the next. Then I laundered the red pile (red clothing should be done away with!) Now I'm just working my way through the delicates. It took about three to four days at first to notice visible progress, but then it took off from there.

With decluttering, I just haven't made a big enough dent yet. I have only decluttered a shelf, drawer and spice rack in my kitchen. I need to persevere until it starts to snowball and then I can't stop decluttering because. . . . LOOK HOW GOOD IT LOOKS!

With saving/debt-payoff, I haven't made it visible--it's all in the computer and not in front of my face every day. I have a choice regarding whether I look at it or not. I am going to post every two weeks (on payday) how much money we have in savings and checking and how much debt is left to pay off.

Now I get to pick a new goal for my top three.

Progress: 1, Status Quo: 0.