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29: Make Chores Easier by Shifting the Way You Think About Them – Meant to Bloom
If you think it’s gonna suck, it’s probably gonna suck. The more you assign negative connotations to your house chores, the more you’re going to grow in hatred of them and continue to avoid them. This is something that’s been an ongoing challenge in my life, overcoming this hatred of cleaning and completing chores.
“You don’t exist to serve your space, your space exists to serve you.”
KC Davis | How To Keep House While Drowning
If your home is your source of stress, rather than a refuge from the stress of the world – if you’re home has become an idol and keeping it clean has sucked all your time and energy and you’re placing the value of a clean home over the value of time spent with loved ones, yourself, or God himself – you’ve perverted the purpose of your home. Like Jesus in the temple, it’s time to start flipping (metaphorical) tables.
Your home has a job, your home is meant to serve you, be a place of peace. When it’s become a stress, it’s time to realign and reassess how you’re spending your time while at home.
I want to share with you the practical tips that have helped me to overcome my hatred of cleaning.
- Understanding that my home is meant to serve me, not the other way around.
How do I WANT to spend my days? Do I want to spend hours on hours everyday doing something I don’t enjoy (cleaning)? Or do I want to change my approach, change my habits and learn to clean from a place of peace?
I changed the way I allow my brain to work. For the longest time I fought the distracted squirrel-brain that told me to pause my task and do another smaller task when I see it.
I also had to overcome the thoughts my mom taught me. My mom did a great job of teaching me the importance of good work ethic, she always said “if you’re not going to do it right the first time, don’t do it at all.”
She meant for me to do the job correctly, but my subconscious brain decided that not doing it all was an option. This caused me to get stuck in a sick spiral of perfection based procrastination. If I wasn’t going to have the time to finish the task, I wasn’t going to begin.
When I decided it was okay for me to do small chunks of a job at a time, it changed the way I approach my home care tasks and it’s allowed me to be far more productive than ever before.
- Realizing that I’ll never be caught up.
Laundry and dishes are both examples of ongoing tasks. As long as you’re wearing clothes, you’ll have laundry to do. As long as you plan on eating, you’ll have to wash dishes. These don’t stop, these don’t end, and waiting until you’re caught up on these before you can start a bigger project, it’s going to be a long time before you get to it.
If the project is decluttering – the best time to start is when you’re behind on laundry or dishes. Here’s the pro tip, when you haven’t put away laundry in two weeks, anything left in your closet is unnecessary. Everything left in your closet, is something you can live without for two weeks. Great time to start.
Same goes for dishes, when your cabinets are bare, what’s left is what you don’t use very often, it’s much easier to question whether or not you actually need that item.
- Change the energy of the room you don’t want to clean.
Walking into a space that feels new and fresh, with a new and fresh energy, will give you more motivation to keep this space clean, it will help you to WANT to spend time in this space. No one wants to clean a kitchen they hate being in. If you need to paint furniture, redecorate, deep clean and rearrange, whatever you need, do it.
- Stop calling them “chores”
Chores suck, no one wants to do chores, ever. I really fought the transition suggested by KC Davis in her book How To Keep House While Drowning, but when I started calling them Home Care Tasks, it shifted the way I look at them. I want to take care of my home.
- Get the Declutter Guide
- Find KC’s book here: (affiliate link)
- Let’s connect on Instagram
- Leave me a rating/review on Apple Podcasts
Brittni Clarkson 
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