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This year, I have decided that I need to dedicate 30 days each month to make simple changes in my life that I can stick with. Permanently. I didn’t want to set a bunch of goals and fail miserably at them a few months from now. Like I have done every year in the past. So for the first 30 days of 2019 I decided that I would get the worst of the tasks marked off my mental list: The Dishes.
Hello again! Did you think that I abandoned my mission for the month of January? Nope. I’m still here, plugging away at it. I just did a horrible job of keeping you informed of how everything was going. Hopefully, February will be better. But, since it’s the 1st of February TODAY, and you don’t even know what I plan to work on for the month, it isn’t looking encouraging is it? 😂 I’ll try to get that post up tomorrow.
So…… How did it go for the past 30 Simple Days? Okay. Did I clean my dishes every.single.night? Nope. Did I wish I had every.single.morning that I got up and there were still dishes in my sink? Absolutely. But, my kitchen has actually stayed cleaner this month than it ever has. I learned an invaluable lesson while I was building this new routine into my life. The more often you do something, the less time it takes. Time is a high dollar commodity in our lives right now. And I feel like I’m cheating and gaining more time by cleaning my kitchen every day.
One thing I managed to actually accomplish this month was running my dishwasher every day. This buys me time. I might not have gotten every dish in my house loaded up, suds up in the sink, rinsed and put away, but I did run the dishwasher. This caused a chain reaction day after day. It took less time every time I did it, because there wasn’t two mountains worth of dishes waiting their turn in the dishwasher or sink. Which gained me TIME.
Another valuable lesson I learned about myself in January is the fact that I need to get my dishwasher loaded up and the dishes cleared away as I’m making supper or it’s not going to happen. Once supper is done, and we all make our plates, I am NOT going to go back into my kitchen to clean. This may be a sad fact, but it is a fact. So every night as I’m making supper, I load the dishwasher and wash what won’t go into it – like my iron skillets, or my giant stainless steel pans. I might be left with my sink full of clean pans when we sit down to eat, but they are clean. And I can live with that.
Don’t mind the dying rose in my kitchen window or the giant ring on my countertop. This is real life people. It gets done, eventually.
I also discovered that even after six plus years of decluttering my house, I still need to declutter more stuff from my kitchen. I have a lot of pots, pans and dishware in my house which does hinder me in keeping up with the dishes. Shhhh. Don’t tell Denton I said that. But, do I really need nine 18/10 stainless steel skillets? No, but this is a downfall of shopping at yard sales and thrift stores.
I have to be diligent about the one in and one out method of shopping. I can buy that All-Clad pan for $5.99 – which I did – but I have to replace one of my other pans with it. Otherwise I am overrun with things. Very nice, lovely, expensive things, but still things that need to be kept, cleaned and maintained. That takes time. Time away from my life that I am enjoying living. No matter how lovely and expensive that All-Clad pan is, I don’t want to spend my valuable time cleaning and maintaining it more than is normal and good. There have to be limits.
So, do I feel like I’ve established a new routine for myself? Yes, yes I do. I’m going to continue to try to do my dishes every single day from now on because I like having a clean kitchen and I also LOVE the fact that I have extra time on my hands because of it. It’s a good feeling on both counts.
Now I’m ready to jump into February!
Do you have plans to make simple changes in your life this year? I would love to hear about it! Let’s build some habits!
You can find all of the posts in this series here.
Tracie