#454 - Chores for Normals: Make 20 Minutes Enough

Hi there, you're listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi. This podcast is not about hacking the system to find more time or hacking your energy to get more done. Hustling to be the best or to make the most out of every opportunity is exhausting and unsustainable so here we do things differently. On this show we value contentment, compassion and living in our season. We favor small steps over big systems. Here we are lazy geniuses being a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't and I'm so glad you're here. Today is episode 454. Chores for normals make 20 minutes enough. Alright I care a lot about helping people find easier ways to do things that matter and taking care of our homes is usually on the list. We all have different approaches to tidying and cleaning and chore management but foundationally most of us want to live in homes that function well, that are comfortable and welcoming and that are not so overwhelmed by tasks and clutter that we just like want to burn it all down. Those times are going to come and there are other episodes for dealing with that energy. But today I want us to find a simpler path to daily maintenance at home. This will not be full of like lots of lists of things for you to do or guilt about what you're not doing. We just don't do that here. Instead we're going to talk about the normal obstacles that make housekeeping hard and what we can do instead. Then we're going to talk about what you could do for two to 20 minutes a day that will impact your desired quality of life at home. Because when it comes to normals like us, people who are just trying to live our lives with kindness and contentment, we don't need to get all up in a twist about house cleaning. Let's just be wise about our homes, what matters in them, and find a way to make 20 minutes enough. After that, for a little extra something, I'm going to share my favorite convenience food right now. I was actually going to share several, but it was almost like a whole separate episode. So in a couple of weeks, I am going to share some of my favorite convenience foods in the actual podcast. Today I'll just share my singular favorite right now. As always, we will celebrate the lazy genius of the week, which is an all-time favorite tip for dusting the house. And then we're going to close with a mini pep talk for when you're overwhelmed by the world. Before we get into the episode, I want to remind you that we have a lot of episodes. This is number 454, but there are way more that aren't numbered in the form of bonus episodes and interviews we've done over the almost 10 years of this podcast. In some ways, that's really fun. It's nice to have so many episodes to go to when you need to lazy genius something. However, it's also like, um, no, that's too many. Too many. So a couple of helpful tools for you to notice to help you find what you need. First, we are starting to release reruns every month, sharing an episode from the archive that we think is super relevant to most listeners right now. You don't have to do anything to get those except subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast listening app. I personally use overcast, but you use whichever one you like. The nice thing about subscribing to a show, as you know, is that you don't have to remember to download something. It does it for you. It's just there when you open your app. And if you're subscribed, you'll, you'll get those bonus reruns that are probably pretty great choices to listen to right now. A second tool you might want to consider is that we have podcast playlists on Spotify. They are labeled like fairly accurately, things like guests, which is all the episodes that are interviews with other people. Margin, which is a collection of key episodes that help you find space in your life as you manage your time. There's work and summer sanity and cooking. And while the playlist don't have every single episode in that category ever, which would kind of be overwhelming anyway, it's a collection of essential episodes that can help you with whatever you're struggling with. And finally, if you ever have a problem or are struggling to figure something out and you think, I wonder if there is a lazy genius episode about this, there probably is use your preferred search engine and search lazy genius and then whatever topic you're curious about and see what pops up. When anyone asks me if I have an episode on something, I usually do a quick search because I don't remember all 454 episodes. And also, I'm like, I mean, yeah, probably hang on. So don't hesitate to just search the internet for what you need. You might get something super helpful right away. But yeah, so many episodes and it's an honor to keep making them for you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for keeping the show alive for almost 10 years with all your listens. It's just so amazing. All right, let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsors, which makes the show free for you to listen to. But before we do, here is your quick reminder about the podcast recap email that we send out every other Friday. It's called latest lazy listens and it summarizes the episode. It shares the lazy genius of the week as well as other segments we have on the show and it has a little extra note for me to help encourage you through the weekend. So if you would like to get that recap, you can head to the lazygenuscollector.com. Slash listens. Hello, I'm Melissa Beth Day, the creator and host of How to Fail. It's the podcast that celebrates the things in life that haven't gone right and what if anything we've learned from those mistakes to help us succeed better. Each week, my guests share three failures, sparking intimate thought provoking and funny conversations. You'll hear from a diverse range of voices sharing what they've learned through their failures. Join me Wednesdays for a new episode each week. This is Melissa Beth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's get into chores for normals and how 20 minutes can be enough. One of life's greatest challenges is managing housework along with all the other things. Like if you could just take care of a home and like not also a job and people and mental health and hobbies and rest and all the things, you could totally take care of your house. You could do your chores. You could keep up with them regularly and not stress out about it. But chores are not the only thing you're doing. Plus, entropy is real and things never stay clean or tidy for very long. We are all familiar with this. The problem with chores is that things can quickly, quickly build up. If you don't do a little bit, most days, that entropy gets all high and mighty and you will be overwhelmed with more mess than you thought could come for a few days. It's almost exponential. How did it get this fast? This fast. It's kind of like brushing your teeth. If you didn't brush your teeth for four days, you would be able to tell a short time of not doing a daily task because of weirdly large consequences. Bushing your teeth for a couple of minutes, a couple of times a day is way better for your dental health and overall life experience than brushing your teeth once a week for like 30 minutes. While the comparison with chores is not exactly one to one, you get my point. It makes enough sense. If we treat the maintenance of a home kind of like we do brushing your teeth, I think it might feel a little easier, like a little bit every day, does us way more good than all at once when our breath is bad enough to kill a small animal. But before you think I'm going to dig when I'm really going to zag, let's lay out what we're really going to do here. I am not about to say to you, hey you, it's been 20 minutes a day, cleaning your house and everything will be fine. It's not that simple. There are some common challenges to daily home care that we need to acknowledge, befriend, and then we can make them a little bit easier, a little bit better. There are also different chores that will specifically impact the overall feeling in your home compared to mine. If you have a dog that sheds or a toddler who can't quite figure out the mechanics of a spoon, you will likely want to vacuum more often than I do. So we need to acknowledge the obstacles, the differences, the seasons of life, create some reframes to give us more compassion in our perspective toward house cleaning, and then choose specific essential chores that fit our lives. That way our 20 minutes a day, it really can be enough. And to be clear, 20 minutes is like, it's a bit of an arbitrary number here. I chose it because it's reasonable and sustainable for most of us. Like even people who work out of the home or have harder jobs can probably find 15 to 20 minutes to do intentionally focused work for their own lives and homes. Now I'm not saying it's easy, or that we're going to do it with big smiles on our faces, or that it's not at the expense of other things. But it's a reasonably accessible amount of time for most people, most days. General and reasonable is what we're going for here, adjust as you would like, right? Alright, so first let's talk about the obstacles that can get in the way and keep us from cleaning our homes like normals. Opsicle number one, overwhelm. Alright, you have 20 minutes. You want to spend it as my friend Hannah calls it, blitzing the house. You want to get as much done as you can before the timer is up because that time is like kind of all you have today. So how do you spend it? How many of us have spent the half of the 20 minutes, like pinballing from room to room, task to task, thing on the floor to thing on the floor, and feel like we got literally nothing done. Or we like spent half of the 20 minutes trying to decide where to start at all. Depending on the state of your home, you might have no idea where to start. The bathrooms need cleaning. The breakfast dishes are still out. The Lego bin has been turned upside down and abandoned. And then as you're cleaning, you like spot and invitation to a party within RSVP that's actually today and something else has become more urgent than your chores. So this episode is called chores for normals and holy moly is it normal for all of us to get overwhelmed by the scope of our chores, by the urgency of something that we just spotted, by not knowing where to begin. Chores are easily overwhelming. So don't feel like you're the only one experiencing that. We all feel that your personality, your season of life, your executive functioning skills, your energy, all of it might shine a light on that overwhelm like from a different angle, or more than you might like, but we all feel it. We all feel it. So first, I want you to befriend the overwhelm. It's normal, it's common, and it's going to happen again. Don't ignore the overwhelm or make it the enemy. Just acknowledge that it's there and learn how to befriend it. In fact, your resistance to being overwhelmed by housework is why you probably make multiple versions of chore charts and by PDFs of how to clean your house. You have bought the lie that you're supposed to know exactly what to do and not be overwhelmed by your home at all. If you are overwhelmed, they say it's because you haven't figured out the right system yet, and so here's the one that will work for you. It's false, false, and my best, Dwight Shrute voice, false, taking care of a house, even if you're the only one living in it. It will always have periods of feeling like too much. And the more people in your home, the longer those periods usually last. Don't fight it, befriend it. You're not abnormal, you're not missing a special cleaning gene, you're very ordinary and human, and you need to remember that chores can be difficult, and they do not end. Like, that's a little overwhelming. Just be there with it. Now, one practical way you can meet that feeling of overwhelm and and stop it from getting out of hand is to know what you're going to do. You know, you go into your 20 minutes, essentially knowing how you'll spend it. That's the second half of this episode, so I hang tight, but ultimately just be kind in feeling overwhelmed. Like, we all feel it, it doesn't make you bad at this. It just makes you normal. This is just how it goes sometimes. Okay, so that's obstacle number one is overall. Obstacle number two is your season of life. Being at home with tiny kids is an obvious obstacle to keeping a house clean in any reasonable way. Tending a home with toddlers underfoot should come with like prizes at the end. It is so intense, it's so repetitive, so messy. Why are tiny humans so dang messy? As we always say, it's like, it's good that they're cute, it's a good thing they're cute. But that's not the only season of life that can make consistent chores difficult. Even for compassionate normals like us, I have several friends who like me have part-time to full-time jobs that do have flexible hours and can be done at home that they self-to-be-done every week. We all have kids in multiple things who need driving around. We have workouts and therapy appointments and trips to Costco and errands to the post office to fit into the weirdness of our normal schedules. And then housework gets attention, but like not at the same time of the day, most days, right? It's just so much to manage and juggle. And at the end of that kind of day, when you've been juggling all of the things, like who in the actual world wants to be like, okay, time to do my 20 minutes cleaning routine, like not many of us, like at least not with a smile on our faces, it's just a hard season of life to clean in. And there are a lot of seasons like that. You might be single and have only yourself to clean up after, but man is it lonely and hard to have everything fall just on your shoulders all the time. It's like Groundhog Day that with tidying the same things over and over again, and that can feel really discouraging. We could go on and on. Your season of life is almost certainly an obstacle to your housekeeping rhythms, and that is normal, expected, and okay, try not to disparage your season of life, but instead live in it. Befriend it. Remember that seasons of life change. What matters to you? You get the good gifts of having laser focus about what you can do and what you cannot. You can experience the freedom of being a genius about some things and lazy about plenty of others because of your season of life. That clarity is really freeing and seasons of life help us see it. Just this morning, I noticed that the, like the rims of my kitchen cabinets are super dirty. We have like shaker style cabinets, which was a mistake because it's like a little ledge for dirt and dust. And I cannot remember the last time I cleaned them. Now the old me before learning to be a compassionate person towards my time and my stuff would be like, man, I need to run the vacuum over every single of one of those, every time I vacuum the floor. That will keep them in better shape, and I get all like in a tizzy. But thankfully, I am wise enough now to know I don't have to maintain everything. Like the cabinet fronts, they can stay dusty. I don't really care. Like you can, I do not. That's not a task I'm going to concern myself with in the season of life. I seriously looked at them and I was like, Kendra, sweet girl, there's no reason to focus on this right now. You're trying to teach a boy how to drive. I just don't care. Now, sure, if a cabinet ridge is like sticky in a truly bothersome way, and I have a soapy rag in my hand from Washington dishes, I'll wipe it up real quick, whatever. But I'm not going to see an unimportant task that does not deserve the limited time in my season of life and try and do it better. I'm just going to leave the cabinets. So your season of life might be an obstacle, but it doesn't have to stay that way. Befriend it, accept it, let it drive your singular priorities, and then let the rest go. It's a gift, really. Opsicle number three is distraction. Naturally, this is in our life in a lot of ways, especially in this technological era that we're in. There are so many things that can distract us from staying locked in to the few minutes that we have chosen to tend to our homes. I have been known to put my earbuds in, hit music on my phone, and then see a couple of texts. And then when I want to answer one of them, it takes me down a rabbit trail on the internet because I have to search out a thing for a thing, for a question. And then I notice my grocery store app, and remember I never placed my order, which we need. It's just a pile on of distraction, right? So obviously, you can be distracted by your phone or some kind of technology. You can also be distracted by tasks and chores and messes that don't really matter right now. We have a little room in the back of the house where I keep my books and the boys play video games, and we have a baby grand piano in there. That was an impulse buy in the early days of our marriage. And I'm so glad we did it, but yeah, it's like a little den, and we have a baby grand piano back there. Well, everything is crammed in tight into that room. It's, you know, but it's, it's cozy. It's fine. Well, the other day I, I was like, I was playing piano, and I noticed the piano bench was, was struggling. It's one of those benches. I mean, are all piano benches like this, where the top lifts, and it stores the music and everything, like probably we have a classic bench. But the bottom of the bench was about to come out. Like, I guess we'd put too many pieces of music in there. I don't know. But the bottom of the bench was buckling. So I emptied everything out of the bench. I grabbed like all the music and the weird guitar paraphernalia that also was in there. And I put all of it in a pile on the floor by the piano, and I kept playing piano. That was like a week ago, and the pile of music is still on the floor. I have walked past it multiple times, and I thought, I will get to that. I will turn to that pile. It has stuff we want to keep, so we probably don't. I'm going to get to it. But I don't have to right now. I have learned with much practice, the trial and error, that I can pass a mess and not stop. I can ignore the dirty cabinet fronts. I can ignore the pile of music on the floor. I can ignore the shoe chaos by the door. I can ignore plenty of things that would try to distract me because I just know they don't matter as much as the other things I'm trying to do. And frankly, that includes things like resting and reading and hanging out. I don't have to have, you don't have to have a perfectly clean home in order to stop. If that's the case, you'll never stop. So yes, you're going to be distracted by your phone. You're going to be distracted by the innumerable things that you could do to your house to make it even more tidy and clean. But like it doesn't matter. Like not everything can matter. And you can practice walking past an unimportant mess and not let it distract you from the task that will actually improve the quality of your day. So the friend, the concept of distraction, it happens, be kind and patient with your inconsistency in that distraction. Just like we talked about last week and learning to be a better problem solver, you're going to be inconsistent. Even when we get to the practical part of your 20 minutes, you're not going to do it the same every time. You're not going to follow through in the most optimized way every time. I don't say that because I don't believe in you. I say that because it's reality. I recently heard a self-help guru who you probably know, talk about how your feelings don't matter. And as she clarified this majorly in the way that we would expect that, like, of course, your feelings matter in her valid. But she was making the point that if you commit to something, if you say you're going to clean your house every day for 20 minutes, you shouldn't go back on your word and let yourself down. That was the phrasing. Not only that, you should ignore your feelings because you're never going to want to do it. You're always going to have something that gets in the way, like kids or hormones. And she listed all those things. The difference is, I think you should be kinder about inconsistency and not see it as letting yourself down. I do not think it is a broken promise to yourself. I think it's life. And for me, not for everybody, but for me, and maybe for you, the minute I start assigning more value to my cleaning routine, then to my energy, or to my hormones, or to the knees and my children, I'm done for, man, like I am now a robot. I am no longer paying attention to the humanity of the situation. And I just never want to be a person who chooses productivity over a person, even if that person is me. So when I say you're going to be inconsistent, that's not like a slam. I think it's a gift. I think it's a welcome message of knowing you don't have to do it all exactly right now. You're going to be distracted sometimes. And like, that's okay. Notice it, adjust it, and move on. Speaking of doing it like exactly, obstacle number four is perfection. You will certainly struggle to have real value in your 20 minutes of housework or whatever the thing is when you are pushing for perfection. I see this cleaning videos where there's not a speck of scum on a shower when they're done. Like every bit of grout is immaculate. It's like deeply satisfying. And I'm going to spend most of my time trying to achieve that level of perfection in my own shower. Absolutely not. No, you can. Anybody can. I will not because I don't need the shower to be perfectly clean. Like I'm about to sell my house. Like I'm great if it's like, you know, pretty much clean, mostly clean. And that's just when it's time to clean the bathroom. Not just like tidying it up. Like it doesn't always have to be super clean. It's not going to always be super clean. Perfection is just the worst, y'all. I always say we want perfection and bridges and surgery. Yes, there are places where perfection is ideal and preferred and even expected. But in the context of being a normal person and a normal life, just like trucking along and taking care of your house, you are wasting your time trying to be perfect. And you're definitely wasting your precious house tending time by trying to make it all perfect. You want the cleanliness to be perfect, the system to be perfect, the compliance of children and partners to be perfect, your motivation to be perfect. None of them will be just let it go. They get angry and have it. The sooner you befriend your expectation of perfection and just like pat her on the head and say, girl, you are so dear. And I know you're trying to make things work well so that we can be in control. But hey, we're good. We're good. Like pat perfection on the head and move on. She doesn't need to be the loudest voice in the room. But befriend her instead of rejecting her. She's just trying like roll hard, but she's just trying. You can remind her she doesn't have to try so hard. Go for good. Not great. Remember that last week? Go for good. Not great. Perfection is not a hill we need to die on. And then finally, the last obstacle I want to bring to our collective attention is completion. All right. This one is a bit tricky. This one will get you. This one will sneak up on you. You will absolutely stumble over the obstacle of completion if you don't pay attention to it. It's like a ninja. It's an except on you so bad. You think that you need to finish, that you need to be done, that you need to complete the chores, complete the list you initially set. Maybe even complete the cleaning of your entire home. Guys, unless you clean your house naked and decide to not eat that day, even if you spend an entire day cleaning your house to completion, it's still not going to be all the way clean. It's just not. You're never going to be done. You're never going to be done. I mean, I hate to be a wet blanket here, but this is just not going to stop. Housework will happen as long as you're breathing. It's just how it is. And for me, I find it incredibly freeing to befriend that. Don't reject it. Don't drown in the forever of it all. Just befriend that you're never going to complete your chores. Completion is a bit of a fairy tale. And it will be an obstacle that keeps you from doing enough for today. Or to do some of what you hope to do and then know that you can do some more tomorrow. Like it's okay. Don't let completion get in the way of doing something even if it's halfway done. So before you do any sort of like daily cleaning routine, remember your obstacles and befriend them. Remember that you will sometimes be overwhelmed by all there is to do. By where to even begin and that that's okay. Don't talk down to yourself because of it or make yourself feel bad because you got yourself into this mess. You know, you don't have to be perfect and optimal and perform well in your own house at the cost of kindness. Just don't do it. Remember the obstacles of your season of life and be kind in it. Remember that distraction is normal and that you don't have to give yourself a talking to because you were inconsistent and what you wanted to do. Just keep going. Like notice and adjust and keep living. Same goes for perfection and completion. Both of these are elusive and deceptive and will absolutely get in your way. So just pat them on the head, tell yourself the truth about what's going on and do what you can without sacrificing yourself for it. Watch out for your obstacles. Almost everybody confronts those five. And then you might have other more personal ones that have come to mind as I've been talking. The way you approach them is the same though. Befriend them. Be kind to yourself in it. Notice, adjust and then keep going. All right. Now that all of that is clear, I guess I'll fight Steve about this. Now that all of that is clear, what do we do with our 20 minutes a day? I am so glad you asked. The answer is you don't start with 20. You start with two. If you do not currently have any sort of like daily tidying or cleaning rhythm in your home, please do not start with 20 minutes. It'll be way too long. Start with two. Now you might be like, Kendra, what do you mean? Two minutes is nothing. Well, zero minutes is actually nothing. Zero guilt-ridden perfection-seeking completion is a minute is nothing. Two minutes is actually something. 20 minutes is like so many some things. But if you do not currently have any sort of daily maintenance rhythm, where you're just like tending to the days detritus, to the trash and the dishes and the mail and the shoes and whatever else, do not begin big. 20 minutes is big. Two minutes is small. Start with two minutes and then you can slowly add more time. That's how it goes. That's just how it goes. And by slowly adding time, I don't mean like in two days, you're 20 minutes. Make sure to intentional minutes a day happens every day for a while until you don't really think about it anymore. And make sure you value those two minutes and you don't diminish their smallness and the power of their smallness. If you do, you're going to put way too much pressure on the 20. So just start with two. Slowly build to 20 or whatever the number, but smaller than you think, especially if you have not started small at all yet. Okay, so that's the amount of time. Now let's talk about the time of day. As you create a little daily maintenance rhythm, when do you want that to happen? Now that is up to you. If you struggle to implement any sort of daily rhythm, is it because you don't want to and your motivation is low? If that's the case, just the friend, your lack of motivation and set yourself a time or just do it, but you could also pick up time that time of day where your energy is like a little higher, right? Now if you're in an office at your highest point of energy, obviously, you know, that can't be when you didn't do your home because you're not at home. But when you are at home, at what point of the day when you are at home, are you the most energetic about your responsibilities? At least as energetic as you can muster. Like it doesn't have to be high energy. Just see like what's the highest you got when you're home. Now if motivation or energy is not really the issue here, it could be more about the mess rhythm of your home. If you're home all day with little kids or even just working from home on your own, doing a daily maintenance routine in the middle of the day, might not feel as good because you know it's not going to last very long. It's going to be messy in, you know, within the hour. So if that's the case, maybe pick a time where the tending will visually last the longest and like allow you to enjoy it for longer. That's probably at the end of the day, like after dinner, ish, maybe when kids have gone to bed or work is over or whatever. So if you spend your 20 minutes at like seven or eight o'clock, even if you go to bed at 10, you still get a couple of good hours to enjoy a little bit more like warmth and coziness in your home than if you didn't do anything at all. Remember, don't let completion and perfection get in the way here. Like just do what you can with the time you have. Enjoy the space and whatever tightiness it offers that that helps you and just live your life. It's like it's fine. But the time of day, choose a time of day that makes sense either based on your energy or how long you can enjoy the maintenance that you have done. Okay, so that's, we've talked about the length of time. We've talked about the time of day you can choose. Those are, those are likely easier for you to choose because it's just like one main decision. You can set an alarm that goes off every day or every weekday or every other day. At the same time to remind you of your 20 minute little maintenance routine once you choose it and see if it works and then you can adjust if it doesn't. Okay, so those two things, the amount of time you spend and the time of day might not be terribly hard. You can start and change your mind if it doesn't work. You can adjust as you go. What's a bit harder is knowing what to do during that time. It's choosing the chores because there are just so many. There are so many that you could do. So here's what I'm encouraging you to do. Okay, let's specifically name with those two to 20 minutes or four. Those minutes are meant to keep your home in a reasonable flow. It's to keep the metaphorical pipes from getting clogged. 20 minutes a day is not where you scrub a toilet. At least I mean, probably not because a normal dirty toilet is not going to keep life from moving along. Now you might make a little face when you sit on it because you're like, I need to clean those. But ultimately it's like kind of fine. But things like dirty dishes, dirty clothes, trash, and maybe even piles of stuff that keep growing. Those things will keep your home from feeling like it isn't a flow. If your trash can is overflowing, if your dishwasher is full of clean dishes and the dirty ones are overflowing on the sink or counter because there's nowhere for them to go. If the laundry has piled up and is overflowing out of the baskets or whatever and now three or four family members do not have underwear, that's what I'm talking about. That's when things feel stuck and incredibly overwhelming because everything is literally overflowing. So your daily maintenance 20 minute routine that you're going to build up to is to keep those things moving. If you tend to trash dishes and clothes for 20 minutes every day, your house will feel completely different. If you intentionally mark off two to 20 minutes every day to just throw away trash, to just move dirty dishes into the kitchen away from, you know, from all the other rooms that they're to empty the dishwasher, to move the load of dirty clothes, to sit in front of the washing machine so that you can do them later. Like you don't even wash your mitt, you just move them to the spot. I just cannot explain to you the deep breath that creates in your home. You think it doesn't matter. You might think that a few minutes every day doing those things is just not going to cut it. Now if you're expecting a perfectly, completely clean home in 20 minutes a day, you're right. That time is not going to cut it. That's not the goal here. The goal here is maintenance. It's keeping things in a flow. It's tending to the things that quickly pile up and clog up and make life suddenly feel really difficult. My guess is you have not experienced this because you're so focused on perfection and completion and the actual cleaning rather than keeping things in a daily maintained flow. Now let's talk about my house just for an example. Since everyone does their own laundry now, the laundry is a little bit less of an issue. It wasn't always like that. Obviously you can listen to old laundry episodes to hear how it used to be different. But because everybody sort of does their own laundry, my daily maintenance is mostly trash and dishes and then stuff that's just like out of place. So I'm picking up hair ties and string cheese wrappers and warmly yelling down the hall. Hey, Annie, your slime is out on the table. Are you done playing with it? Sometimes she's not. And it's just like using the bathroom or something and other times she is done. So I'll be like, hey, can you put it away real quick? And she does. Sometimes grumpily, but like so do I. Chores are not always a good time, right? But that kind of just like quick maintenance every day of just like picking the trash up off the floor, moving the dishes into the dirty dishes zone in the kitchen, those kinds of things will change your home. And then here's the thing. When you do have a couple of hours on a weekend or whenever to actually clean, to actually tend to the dirt and grime in your house, it will be so much easier because you're already in a rhythm of tending to those regular daily things that get in the way of cleaning. It's so much easier to run a vacuum over a floor that does not have stuff on it, right? Now, one thing I want us to pay attention to is the difference between this daily maintenance routine that I'm talking about. And then general housekeeping that already happens naturally, like you might already clean up the kitchen after dinner or somebody in your house does, but pretty naturally, that's fine. That doesn't necessarily count in your 20 minutes. Or maybe you have a good rhythm of like washing a little clothes every day, and you fold them all you wash TV at night, you know, you're already in that rhythm. That doesn't need to be part of your 20 minutes or your two minutes or whatever. Some chores just happen naturally and throughout the day. So don't look at this daily maintenance 20 minutes as the only time that you will tend to your home. There will be other times where singular chores will need to happen and you will do them. Or they're just already part of your rhythm. But for the overall, like care and flow of your home, a daily, at least as daily as you're able, right? A daily intentional short bursts of time where you honor the smallness of that time, where you take care of trash dishes and clothes and maybe one other thing that's like essential to your own household flow, like dog hair. That's going to change your home. It really, really will. You might not think it will because you don't think that general tidying or tending to things that never end is going to do very much, but it honestly does the most. Like don't knock it till you try it. It's not all about complicated cleaning routines and like doing bathrooms on Thursdays. Just like tend to the mess in your home for a few minutes and then be done. Even if there's still some out, it's okay. Get used to the rhythm of this small amount of time and honor yourself in that. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to try this in the smallest form possible. I want you to consider your home, your current daily rhythms and make a couple of simple decisions. First, just pick your amount of time. Start with two minutes if you don't have any minutes yet. Even if you think that's too small, I want you to do what you can for two minutes and then stop. Remember completion is not a thing. So just be done. Especially if you really want to be. You'll get another two minutes tomorrow or like in the second half of the day. You can do this a couple times a day if you want to do. Like just you can slowly build up to more minutes or you can stay at two. Some seasons only you get to. That's okay. So that's the first thing is pick your amount of time. Next, pick a time of day and pick a time that gives you the most bang for your maintenance buck. I would encourage you to set an alarm on your phone to begin and set it so that it goes off every single day at the same time. You could make the label and the sound of the alarm something that energizes you or makes you laugh rather than makes you sad. My daughter, oh my gosh, she hates to read so much and when she sets her alarm to read her school, the end sound is this like awful blaring siren thing. She picked the worst sound because she thinks the task is the worst thing. So I mean like you do you girl. But I am here to tell the rest of you listening that maybe another tactic it could be more beneficial. At least the one that like gets you into the thing. Like pick an alarm sound that gets you into it. And then if you when you set your timer, maybe if you want to set a crazy alarm siren alarm at the end like Amy does, then you can pick your blare and go for it. Now as far as what you do within the amount of time that you have decided at the time of day that you have chosen starts mal. Please start small. I think there are just a handful of essential tasks that would work in most homes. And you can pick which one like start with just one of these that feels like it works the best for you in your home. And then as you slowly add time, you can slowly add tasks. Okay. You're going to be doing this a long time. You can take your time figuring out what works for you. Let it build naturally. Okay. Let it grow. So the first one is trash. Like go around the house with like a little grocery bag or an actual big trash bag and just pick up all the trash. You can empty, you know, the little bathroom and bedroom trash cans and your big trash bag if you want. But really you're just picking up trash around the house and keeping that moving pretty much every day. That's hugely helpful. Another essential task is gathering all the dirty dishes. They could be all over the kitchen. They could be all over the actual house. Just gather them up. Put them on one spot on your counter and then leave it. Now you can of course keep going and put them in a dishwasher or wash them things if you want to, but you can also just leave them. You can leave them there. But by bringing the dirty dishes to one spot, you are still keeping things in a flow. You're still keeping things moving. They still have to get to the kitchen, right? Another essential task is just putting things away. So you grab stuff off the floor, hang coats back on the hook, move the male from the kitchen counter to the designated place for the male. Just put things away. That is hugely helpful because the rhythm of putting things in their place will number one, illuminate what doesn't actually have a place, which is going to make your tidying extra hard if things don't have a place. And then two, it will clear the deck for things like vacuuming or dusting on days when you do have time for those tasks. Okay? So trash, dirty dishes, just putting things away. And then finally, the essential task that's true for most homes is tending to dirty clothes. So you can literally do the smallest thing to move the laundry along. Remember we're just keeping it in a flow. We're just keeping it moving. It's like our lazy genius of the week a couple weeks ago. Do you remember it was our first voice memo lazy genius of the week where she shared she checks on the laundry every other day. She doesn't necessarily do a load, but she's checking on what needs to move along. You can be that small in it. Just check, just a look and no. So you can bring a full hamper to sit in front of the washer and leave it. You can put your dirty clothes that are on the floor in the hamper. Be done. You can drag the basket of clean folded laundry in front of your kids' dresser. So they'll put it away when they get home from school and be done. All you're doing in your small amount of time in your two to 20 minutes is the most essential maintenance to keep your home in a flow. You're not cleaning. You're not organizing. You're just tidying and moving things along. If you spend two to 20 minutes doing this kind of thing every day, not to completion, but to when the timer stops, your home will start to change. Your attitude toward your chores will start to change. Honestly, because of how much easier they might be to do once daily maintenance becomes part of your rhythm. Now, is this fail safe? No. If you have toddlers, nothing is. But even with toddlers, you can still value two minutes. Like every bit helps. It really does. Every bit helps. I cannot emphasize the power of smallness in this. Stop trying to think that you need to clean everything to completion and perfection all the time. And that anything less than that is some sort of failure. It is not. It is absolutely not. So pay attention to your obstacles. Don't get down-trodden by being overwhelmed. Don't disparage your season of life or expect unreasonable routines that don't fit in that season of life right now. Befriend distraction and inconsistency. Don't let them be the bee in your bonnet that the productivity gurus want them to be. Notice, adjust, and move on. And stop letting perfection and completion. Stop letting those keep you from doing tiny things that make a difference. Do a tiny thing. Do two minutes and stop. Stop thinking that that's not enough. Stop thinking that that means that you're not doing a good job at this. It's just not true and it's keeping you stuck. Okay. So once you are thinking about those things, choose your length of time. Start small. If you haven't done it at all, start with two minutes. Choose your time of day. Set an alarm on your phone. And then maintain of the four essential tasks, trash, dishes, putting things away, and dirty clothes. Choose the one to begin that will make the most difference in your home as you start. And then over days and even weeks, you can add the next most helpful one to the mix. Keep adding slowly over time. Not doing too much too fast. As you let this daily maintenance routine grow. If you go too fast, it's not going to stick. If you add too much, you're going to run out of steam. So remember, you're going to do this forever. So don't rush it. It's okay to take your time. And that's chores for normals. How 20 minutes can be enough. All right. Let's get into today's a little extra something. Like I said, I originally was going to share my five favorite convenience food items and then three convenient things that I don't really buy at all that a lot of other people do. Y'all was so long. It was like an episode. So instead, I'm going to share my absolute favorite convenience food right now. And then I will share the longer list and a couple of weeks because do you know what is not convenient listening to an entire least a genius episode and then getting another one because I'm like weirdly obsessed with convenience foods right now. So my favorite convenience food, at least right now, is the pre-pulled rotisserie chicken from Costco. Listen, getting a rotisserie chicken is already convenient. I mean, you didn't have to cook a chicken. It's just, there you go. But I hate taking the meat off a chicken. I like so much. And I don't like the rotisserie chicken skin either. It like it smells weird to me for some reason. My hands break out when I break down the chicken. Like I just don't have time for that. I mean, I mean, technically I do, but I would rather spend my time in other ways. So I love getting the pre-pulled rotisserie chicken in like the little vacuum sealed pack that usually has an expiration date like two months from when I buy it. It is magical. I use rotisserie chicken for a family favorite dinner of chicken soup. I mostly love it for my own lunches. I'll make chicken salad, barbecue chicken wraps. If I have pickled red cabbage around, I'll toss it in a salad or with like pesto and pasta. My daughter, Annie, actually really loves rotisserie chicken as a snack, which cracks me up. We'll go with it though. I just love those packs of chicken that requires your work for me. The convenience has definitely worked the extra cost. And I love it so much. Now, it does not have to be worth the cost to you. And I bless you in your chicken endeavors. Whatever they may or may not be. But as for me in my house, we will purchase the most convenient delicious version of cooked and ready to eat chicken possible. So we have a, what's saving my life episode coming up in a couple of weeks. And spoiler, one of the things saving my life right now are my particular selection of convenience foods. So I will share my whole list then. So you have that to look forward to. And now for our lazy genius of the week, this week we have Natalie. Natalie says, dusting is a rarity in our home. But we do have a fair amount of surfaces that show dust really badly. And I do love a clean dark wood end table with a shiny lamp. When I sit down at the end of the day and notice dusty surfaces, it does bother me a little. So lately, when I take off socks that have not gotten much wear or never went into any shoes, I use them to dust a surface nearby and throw them in the laundry basket. There's good as any microfiber cloth. And there's no need to put that task on a list anywhere. There's no need to put that task on a list anywhere. Do you hear that? You just do it when you think about it. Do it when you notice it. Do it with the sort of clean sock on your foot. I love this. I also just love a sock puppet dusting moment. This was a savior for our family when my kids were little. And like we were always home. I would give my boys socks on their hands and be like, okay, we go put like magic spells on all the furniture. Now they would not do a very great job. But perfection is not the goal here, right? It was better than nothing. And it got rid of more dust than not dusting wood. Plus I had fun. They were part of things. And it was small enough to do. Natalie is doing the same thing. Just notice what you appreciate. Tend to it in a small, easy, sustainable way. And then be done. And then just be done. I love it, Natalie. It's so good. Thank you for sharing. And congratulations on being the lazy genius of the week. All right, let's close with a mini pep talk for when you feel overwhelmed by the world. I do not need to tell you that there's a lot happening right now. There is fear and heartbreak. And frankly, it is hard to know what to do with all of it. If you need more robust encouragement in this area, then a mini pep talk can ever give. You can go to episode 427 when you're overwhelmed by the world. I apply the 13 lazy genius principles to figuring out how to navigate the world and all that we're processing. And I hope that episode helps you. But for today, for right now, I think my encouragement to you is to do what you can to control the timing of what you hear. You can't control what you hear, but you can control the timing of it. You know, the news is overwhelming on its own. But for me, when it arrives on my mental doorstep in the form of like news alerts and an Instagram algorithm that does not have my mental health or capacity in mind, I can spiral really quickly. So I wonder what it would mean for you to do what you can to control the timing of what you hear. For me, it's keeping Instagram off my phone for the majority of the week. It means getting my news from reputable sources that are not trying to activate my rage. And from turning any sort of news alert off on my phone, I still learn what's going on in the world. And I do what I can with what I hear. But I also do as much as possible on my own timing with my own capacity in mind. It's so easy to become overwhelmed by the world simply with what is happening in it. But the pile on of the internet on top of that, it can be untenable. At least it is for me. So if you're feeling that way, you might want to listen to the episode on being overwhelmed by the world for, you know, like I said, for kind of a longer, more robust set of help. But for today, I would just be proud that you're human and you're hurt over things that are happening. That's beautiful. And we should be. And also remember that you're human and you need to be wise and how often you emotionally engage in what's happening. So make decisions that allow you to be informed and to maintain the energy that you want to give to the issues and the needs that matter to you while also trying to pay attention to the timing of those things. Do what you can to control the timing of them. And that can allow you to more wisely invest in the involvement in them. And it's also really hard. I just want to say that. It's a really hard time right now. One day at a time, one decision at a time, one debrath at a time. And as our friend Shandon Martin says, to find the counterweights don't just like dive into all that is hard, but you have to balance it with things that are beautiful in your life. So find what those are. Those can I have any timing. You don't have to control the timing on those. Enjoy those whenever you can. And that is a many pep talk for when you're overwhelmed by the world. If this episode was helpful to you, or if you've been looking for a way to support the show, I would be so grateful if you would share this episode with a friend, or if all your friends are already lazy geniuses, you can leave a kind review on Apple podcasts. Every mention matters, so thank you so much for supporting the show. This podcast is part of the Odyssey family and the Office Ladies Network. This episode is hosted by me Kendra Adachi, an executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jennifer and Angela Kinsey. Special thanks to Leah Jarvis for Weekly Production. If you'd like a podcast recap every other week, be sure to sign up for the latest lazy listens email that goes out every other Friday. Head to the lazygeamescollective.com slash listens to get it. Thanks y'all for listening, and until next time, be a genius about the things that matter. And lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra, and I'll see you next week.