How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House's Dirty Little Secrets
Dana K. White
Bring your home out of the mess it’s in and learn how to keep it under control.
“The dirty little secret about most organizing advice is that it’s written by organized people,” says blogger, speaker, and decluttering expert Dana K. White. “But that’s not how my brain works. I’m lost on page three.” Dana blogs at A Slob Comes Clean, chronicling her successes and failures with her self-described “deslobification process.” In the beginning she used the name “Nony” (short for aNONYmous), because she was sharing her deep, dark, slob secret. Now she has truly come clean—with not only her real name but the strategies she has developed, tested, and proved in her own home. She has learned what it takes to bring a home out of Disaster Status, which habits make the biggest and most lasting impact, and how to keep clutter under control.
In How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind, Dana explains that cleaning your house is not a onetime project but a series of ongoing premade decisions. Her reality-based cleaning and organizing techniques debunk the biggest housekeeping fantasies and help readers learn what really works. Chapter titles include
My First Step: Giving Up on the Fantasy
The Worst Thing About the Best Way
Just Tell Me What to Do
Conquering Laundry
Get Dinner on the Table
Putting an End to the Never-Ending Weekly Cleaning Tasks
Don’t Get Organized
How to Declutter Without Making a Bigger Mess
Fighting the Perceived Value Battle
But Will It Last?
With a huge helping of empathy and humor, Dana provides a step-by-step process with strategies for getting rid of enormous amounts of stuff in as little time (and with as little emotional drama) as possible.
Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff
Dana K. White
You don't have to live overwhelmed by stuff--you can get rid of clutter for good!
While the world seems to be in love with the idea of tiny houses and minimalism, many of us simply can't purge it all and start from nothing. Yet a home with too much stuff is a home that is difficult to maintain, so where do we begin? Add in paralyzing emotional attachments and constant life challenges, and it can feel almost impossible to make real decluttering progress.
In Decluttering at the Speed of Life, decluttering expert and author Dana White identifies the mind-sets and emotional challenges that make it difficult to declutter. Then, in her signature humorous approach, she provides workable solutions to break through these struggles and get clutter out--for good!
But more than simply offering strategies, Dana dives deep into how to implement them, no matter the reader's clutter level or emotional resistance to decluttering. She helps identify procrasticlutter--the stuff that will get done eventually so it doesn't seem urgent--as well as how to make progress when there's no time to declutter.
Sections of the book include
Why You Need This Book (You Know Why)
Your Unique Home
Decluttering in the Midst of Real Life
Change Your Mind, Change Your Home
Breaking Through Your Decluttering Delusions
Working It Out Room by Room
Helping Others Declutter
Real Life Goes On (and On)
As long as we're living and breathing, new clutter will appear. The good news is that decluttering can get easier, become more natural, and require significantly fewer hours, less emotional bandwidth, and little to no sweat to keep going.