Any Flylady's

[freedeal]

Thanks so much for this post. I wanted to ask the question just didn't get around to it.

I looked at the site the other day. I have heard alot about it. Mostly negative. I want to do it but most people seem to think it is overwhelming (just the people who have given me their opinions) but I am ALL about getting rid of clutter right now.

I have been throwing bags of stuff out and am getting ready to either freecycle my older piano or run a classified.

Anyone want to give some tips on starting Flylady?

[canadian gardener]

I get the emails, I enjoy the reminders as a neat little tick list, it helps me see how much I got done by deleting them. Some nice ideas come thru the testimonials.

That said, I don't follow her routine, I have my own (listed under the house that cleans itself and fellow threads in the cleaning forum).

Over the years of writing about her and other cleaning methods I've noticed that people either love her or hate her. She does a lot of good, but I've also noticed a common theme in people who have trouble with her system.

They find the emails overwhelming. First in the sheer numbers. I call it the daily flood for a reason. You can tame it by subscribing to the digest version only which comes once a day.

Second beginners usually overdo it and try to do it all.

Flylady begs newbies repeatedly to ignore the daily flood and concentrate on one or two habits (her shiny sink and de cluttering usually) and work outwards from there, one habit at a time till things are humming along.

Experienced "flyers" as they call themselves usually ignore the stuff they aren't prepared to deal with-- deleting the messages as they read them-- often as they simply read the title.

for example rather than opening the "where is YOUR laundry?" email, they read the title and think OK where IS my laundry? and go deal with it after deleting the email.

It's a to do list that comes to your in box every day, and you delete as you read. It is meant to spark your memory-- if the laundry needs to go from the washer to the dryer and you are playing on the computer, it's time to think AHA laundry moment, deal with it and get back to having some fun.

BUT for a lot of people it's confusing overkill. They end up doing stuff that doesn't need doing out of a need to conform to someone else's to do list and end up burning out.

Flylady tries to deal with that by explaining in glorious detail how NOT to be a perfectionist.

Those antiperfectionist letters are worth their weight in gold in my humble opinion.

But back to overkill. She does stuff that doesn't need doing in order to maintain order. Which is ok for her, she knows when to quit.

But her flybabies don't always remember that she is also telling them not to over focus and over do.

The Monday house blessing is meant to clean up the cowtrails thru the house, not spring clean the corners. She gets a lot of flak from people who can't see the difference between a 10 minute by the timer fast tidy and top clean and a "proper cleaning" that also does the corners etc.

Her system is maintenance mode, with a little work each week on a specific region of the house so the whole house does get a proper cleaning, but not every week.

Which is good. That timer is a good idea, keeping the perfectionist from bogging down into the details that rightly belong to spring cleaning mode.

If you have trouble with knowing when to quit or tend to be a perfectionist, focus on her timer use, and on her antiperfection messages.

Ignore the daily flood. Perfectionist house cleaners can be overwhelmed by the daily flood feeling that it all has to be done at once, and done "perfectly".

[canadian gardener]

The control journal as she calls it, is a GREAT idea not limited to flylady. Most home organization experts come to that idea sooner or later. In fact Organized Home which has a number of wonderful printout forms, has a lot on creating your own home manual. Organized Home was started by another member of the original Sidetracked Sisters site, which also started Flylady.

She and Flylady are very different in style and if you don't care for Flylady, (I personally enjoy both) you may prefer Organized Homes suggestions.

A household binder in which you keep the important phone numbers, some lists of what needs doing when (aka routines) and some menu plans that use YOUR OWN recipes, with YOUR OWN master shopping list are great.

I have started mine years ago when I read Totally Organized or maybe the other book by Bonnie McCullough-- can't remember. But one of them had a wonderful home manual plan.

As for doing one on your own-- I'll launch a thread on that.