The Office.

It’s a personal blog, so there’s bound to be a post or two… or two million about things I’ve done that day and what I’m proud of. I mean, that’s life right?

I’ve been on my ass about getting things done around the house every day now, especially since I’m trying to work from home almost full-time. I spend a lot of time in this office, and while it’s spacious, it gets messy rather quickly.

K and I are pretty bad about cleaning the house. If you ever visit us, we’re that couple that always says “sorry, we haven’t cleaned in a while.” And while things aren’t really that bad, everything does build up, and you feel like you’ve never seen the house clean.

We used to spend Saturday’s cleaning the whole apartment, but we noticed we’d get tired midway through and not want to continue working. So, we’d just put it off for weeks or we’d half-ass the job.

Given the fact that I’m home more often now, (although my time is spent sitting at a computer, working on contracts and trying to stay focused on work) I felt like it was my job to start doing more house chores, especially since K comes home extremely exhausted from work.

So I brought back my to-do-list method. Scheduling little chores I have to do every day, and my daily work that needs to get done, and honestly… I’m going through it much easier than I used to.

I mean, I’ve kept a bunch of to-do-lists in the past, and they work really well for me, I just keep losing the notebook. This time around, I’m using one of those apps (and here’s when I sound like every person on the fact of the earth), but I’m feeling like I’m not really relying on it much. I’m looking at it at the beginning of the day and doing the tasks, checking them all off way before I ever thought I would.

Today one of my tasks was to clean this office… and man, I shouldn’t have put that on the list. Cleaning my desk on it’s own is a task and a half. But a few hours of cleaning (honestly getting on the floor and sweeping, picking up every screw or misplaced object) and I was done.  And boy does it feel good.

And it mostly reminded me of how my mother would do rooms at a time and it made me really respect what she did for us as kids. We didn’t grow up having many chores. My mom wanted us to focus on school and getting good grades, so she did a lot of the cleaning around the house. But my mom (being the perfectionist that she is) would deep clean the house every week. Week after week she would move every single object off the shelf, clean them and make sure they were all right back in place. And when we’d come home she’d be sitting exhausted on the couch and we didn’t really get it. We didn’t get the fact that it is literally exhausting to maintain a house, especially by yourself.

Midway through my cleaning, I messaged my mom thanking her for all the work she did for us, especially for the shit we didn’t realize she did for us. And while at the time I wasn’t grateful for what I had I am truly grateful for it now and hope to take that practice on in my own life.

It’s awesome having a clean workspace and it’s awesome to actually complete the tasks I want to put myself out to do. Now to keep it going years from now.