Fresh Start: The Deep Clean
One of the early decisions you can think about is if you want to keep the same setup you've got right now. I recently got a new desk for my office after I accidentally broke my old desk. Instead of just moving the desk into the same position, I took the opportunity to rearrange my office. While this did take a bit of work to get things set up again in a way that is functional, it has been a great adjustment.
Our ADHD brains are always seeking novelty and moving stuff around can be a fairly easy way to create that novelty. It also has an added benefit of forcing some pre-emptive decluttering.
As I said I broke my old desk and so I had to clear everything off of it - and this meant that when I was setting up my new space I had the option of choosing what was going to go back on my desk.
As our crap builds up in our space some of it carves out its own new home and suddenly my "minimalist" desk set up has pictures and books and pen cups and sticky notes all over it. Sure some of these things are good to have on my desk but others just serve as distractions. By changing how I had my set up it was easy for me to ask the question, "should this go here?" For a lot of things, the answer was no, it doesn't need to be on my desk so I just need to find a new place for it to live.
Of course, you don't need to completely rearrange your space to use this idea - instead of using the question "should this go here?" you can instead start with "if I was setting this up for the first time, would I put this here?"
I've done this with some of the weird stuff that kind of just started living in my car at some point - and this is an important step because it often feels like, well yeah I'm going to put this here because that's where I picked it up from. But unless it is actually useful for you in that space, maybe it needs to find a new place to live.
And this is really just the first step we need to take in decrapifying our space. Yeah, that's right, we're talking about decrapification. We don't need to kid ourselves, we both know that a lot of our space has just been taken over by crap that we don't need or want.
Now I'm not talking about trying to go minimalist here or anything, what I'm talking about instead is making more space for the stuff that actually matters. I know entirely how easy it is for us to just hang onto stuff that we "might" need someday. We don't need all this stuff but unless we make a concentrated effort to get rid of it, well it's going to just keep growing.
And let me tell you, getting rid of stuff feels surprisingly good. Sure people talk about retail therapy as a way to boost their mood, but decluttering therapy has way more benefits.
We recently had a neighborhood garage sale and it was fantastic to get rid of a lot of that stuff. When I let go of some of those things it lifted mental burdens that I didn't even realize I was carrying. Suddenly I didn't have to worry about when I was going to fix that old bike, instead, some guy handed me some cash and tossed it in his truck. Just like that something that had existed at the back of my to-do list was gone.
Declutter can also benefit us with better focus - when we have less stuff it's easier for us to find things and there are fewer things out to distract us. This can also help reduce anxiety and give us more confidence. Having a clean space is a great feeling, but it is much harder to maintain when we've just got too much stuff.
Now I also want to drop in some very ADHD-specific advice here. First, start small. Don't try and declutter or rearrange your entire house in one afternoon. Maybe start with a drawer, a closet, or just one room. Sure, our motivation at the beginning says we'll just work our way straight through with everything, but that motivation will wain and we don't want to end up halfway through the project and then just end up living in a half-rearranged house.
And on that additional end, we will lose that initial burst of motivation after we get started. Sure I did a pretty good job of rearranging part of my office, but I've still got a corner with a bunch of crap piled in it. The longer I let it sit there the easier it's going to be for me to let it just sit there.
What we need here is some good old-fashioned accountability... or perhaps some not-so-old-fashioned accountability. A great way for us to get things done is through body doubling - and this is where you just have someone who works alongside you doing their own work. I do this fairly frequently while working on episodes for this show. It helps keep me on track of what I should be doing instead of say just scrolling through memes on Reddit.
Now we may not be ready to have someone else in our house to be this body double for us, but we can still use this technique through the magic of the internet. I use the ADHD reWired Adult Studyhall for this, but you could as easily do this with a friend over Zoom or facetime. The point is just to have someone there that is there to help you keep your word of what you were going to do. Accountability isn't the other person making you do the thing - I mean think about it, that person on the other end of a Zoom call can't make you do anything. But it's a lot harder to rationalize something to someone else. Sure it might be easy for me to argue in my head that I don't really have to finish this project today, but when I just told someone that was my intention I have to work a lot harder at finding a good rationale behind my procrastination. Accountability lays bare our intentions and keeps us on track with them.
And this accountability can extend beyond just your single day of cleaning. Get a partner to go through your whole house with. Maybe you do an hour a day. Maybe you do 15 minutes.
And again this is an important step here. We know that we're not going to be doing everything in a single day so make a plan with someone and create that accountability that is going to help you follow through on what you want to do because again accountability is about you. You taking ownership of what you want to do and then doing the dang thing.
Another piece here that going to really help the process is writing out some sort of plan on where you want to declutter and what done is going to look like. This is a step that I am always inclined to skip because I just want to cut to the doing because then I'll get through it faster right?
Well as mentioned earlier this probably isn't going to be a single-day activity - sure you might get through a whole room or do a closet or maybe a drawer, but then you are going to have to come back to it at another time. Here's the issue. We think we're going to remember where we stopped and what our next step was supposed to be but... well we all know how well that works in reality. I recently fell into this trap while sorting through my paper monster - I was actually get a lot of progress on this project, but I needed a good amount of space so I was doing my sorting on the dining room table. Come the end of the day I need to put away those piles so that we can eat. No worries, I tell myself, I'll just pull everything back out tomorrow and get back to it.
Lo and behold come the next day I actually have no clue about what plans were for how to get the papers back out. And so I just didn't... and now like 3 weeks later I have boxes of paper that I want to sort through next to the table that I don't want to start up again on. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to jump back in on the project sooner or later and I'm probably going to have to redo some of the sortings I did earlier because I don't remember the system I was trying to use earlier.
Save yourself the headache and create at least a simple plan of what you're doing and how you're doing it. Bonus points for leaving yourself a note when you're done for the day so you know where to start back up tomorrow - which is also important if say you miss a couple of days because life happened. You might remember what you need to do tomorrow but what if something comes up and you have to get back to it next week instead. I know I hate taking time for proper clean up but it is incredibly worth it.
I also mentioned that we want to include what done looks like in our plan. This may seem unnecessary because well I'll know what done looks like when I see it. But will you? Done can be a bit elusive if we haven't taken the time to define it. Having done defined also gives you a target to aim for and can help reduce that scope creep where... okay I want to sort my papers into these various piles - but hey wouldn't it be great if I also sorted them by date too?
Sure, maybe, but I can decide if I really want to do that after I hit that first milestone of done instead of trying to shoehorn a new system in halfway through and then not end up finishing anything because I made it overcomplicated.
All right, let's get into some specifics of our decrapify so we can start building that plan
Our first step is going to be just getting rid of trash. Even as I write this my brain goes, okay, but how much just straight-up trash is there to deal with. And then I glance at my desk... Oh, receipts, a bag for... something, an old disposable mask, an old coffee cup, a bunch of sticky notes for things that are no longer relevant.
Beyond that we also just have stuff that may not be stuff "trash" per se, but also isn't something that you want to keep either (and no one else is going to want either). Think old birthday cards, promotional items, broken things (especially if they can't be fixed) - anything that you've got sitting around that you don't want but also couldn't give away.
In this first pass-through, things shouldn't be too difficult. We're talking trash here - this is stuff we don't want. If there is a question about it, just skip it, you can get back to it later.
With that step done now, we can focus a little tighter on how we want to approach our cleaning. There are a number of schools of thought but they basically boil down to doing things by category or by room. If we're going by category we might have things like books, clothing, gadgets, hobby-specific stuff, and paper. I don't really think there is a specific benefit to doing one method over the other and I tend to kind of do a hybrid approach where I focus some on categories but often within the context of a specific room. This keeps me from doing too much wandering from place to place.
This is also a great opportunity to start hitting some of those places that you don't clean that often, such as the refrigerator. I know doing a deep clean of the fridge doesn't sound like that much fun, because well, it isn't. But we've all got things in our icebox that don't really need to be there - there have been plenty of aspirational food choices that I've made at the grocery store that never panned out and now they're usually sitting in my freezer or pantry and just taking up space. We don't need to wait until these items are five years past their expiration date to throw them out.
Oh but you say that's wasteful? Well, if you're going to use it, set a date and use it. If you're not willing to find a time to use by though, just get rid of it.
We can then move into the kitchen and start clearing out some of those gadgets that we got for Christmas but never used. The kitchen is a great place to focus at least a little time on decluttering because it is one of those places that we are absolutely going to be using. One place that we have a lot of clutter creep is our counters and we need those. It's incredibly frustrating when you're trying to do the right thing and chop up some veggies to go with your dinner but you have to shuffle everything around on the counter to make it happen.
The first step here is just clearing out those things that don't need to be there - we have this propensity to just set things down and let them live there, but that leads to us having things where they don't really belong. Find new homes for those things. Once we have space we can decide what truly needs to live on the counters and what doesn't. This can be a little tricky with ADHD because for certain things, out of sight equals out of mind. If putting away the blender is going to keep you from making those smoothies that have been helping with your lunches then by all means keep it on the counter.
And we can apply these same ideas to a lot of the places around our home. Find the stuff that just got put down and give it a real home - an easy way to think of this is to try and imagine where you'd look for the thing if you needed to find it. For example, looking at my desk right now I have an extra monitor cable that doesn't need to be there and my desk is absolutely the wrong place to keep it. Now, the idea now is to think where would I look for this when I needed it - well, for me, this is an easy one, I've got a big bin of cables out in the garage. Now here's a trick with that too - put a little bit of tape on the cord and write what it's for, that way when you're looking for that one transformer to plug in that thing you haven't used in months you don't have to look through everything trying to find the one that actually matches.
And to reiterate the point here, we're not trying to do all of this at once. I know it tempting to try and make the big change but we can often make more progress with the little things we do. The biggest key is to create some kind of accountability to keep you going even when you don't want to.
