148 | The Difference Between Cleaning, Tidying, and Organizing - All 3 are Essential in an Orderly Home - Intentional Edit

Today we are talking about cleaning, tidying and organizing and why understanding the difference will help you keep your home organized longer.

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Full Episode Transcription (not edited):

If you struggle to clean and maintain any sense of organization you probably feel like you always have things or items stacked up on all your flat surfaces at home and you jump from one project to another. When it comes to anything that has to do with organizing, picking up, doing chores or cleaning the house, you probably are combining and confusing three separate things, three separate tasks today we’re diving into cleaning, tidying and organizing.

If you are looking for a way to connect and you want to communicate with other people that are trying to get organized and trying to do clutter a great way to do that is to join us in to the intentional edit Facebook community. It’s a private group. I’ve had a couple of people recently say I requested access to the group, but I didn’t get approved. If you are requesting access to the Facebook group, then you have to answer the three questions that it asks you. It will prompt you for those.

It can be one word or a little sentence, or even a fragment. It really doesn’t matter, but I need you to answer those questions. It’s the only way I know that you aren’t a real person and that you’re not trying to. Solicit, or you’re not some kind of a bot or something or someone that’s coming in to harm the group and really challenge the integrity and all of that. So just answer those three simple questions and seriously, one word answers will do, but that will get you approved because then we know that you’re a real person.

When people request access without the answering of the questions, then they just immediately get deleted or denied. So. It’s really simple. The intentional edit Facebook community was designed just for listeners of the podcast. So if that is something that interests you, if you want to go to a place where we share articles and resources and have conversation and you can message me and all of that, you can ask questions and I will answer them there.

The Facebook community is a great place to do that. There’s a link in the podcast description, wherever you are listening to this, scroll down, Google and click join the Facebook group and make sure you answer the three quick questions that it asks you just to verify that you are a real person who wants to be there, whether you want to participate, or you just want to watch and see what happens. I would love to have you over in the intentional edit Facebook community. You could do that and now let’s get right into it and get into the beef of this episode.

We all know a clean home, a picked up home and orderly home is more appealing than one that is messy, cluttered, dirty, all that stuff. It’s simple. , it really is a simple, concept. As an average person, we feel better in an environment that is overall more picked up and cleaner than we do in something that is.

Dirty or full of excess that has the piles surrounding us. The clutter everywhere. When there is stuff around and everything we look at is cluttered. It just doesn’t feel as good. And of course, when you talk about. Dust and debris and the like the dirt or the dirtiness of a home to that is something completely different than a home. That’s not organized. What, they’re both an added stressor. They’re bad for health. They make us feel stressed out.

And we don’t realize some of the negativity. And how harmful it is to live in these environments. Now, this doesn’t mean that we have to be a neat freaks and have everything perfect all the time, but we desire clean over dirty. We desire picked up over clutter everywhere. We have, like, we want the tasks to be completed instead of unfinished. Sometimes we desire something, but we don’t know how to get there. And that’s when we look for more help or we try to figure out a better way to do something. We go outside of ourselves to find out the way to get the answers, the way to get the desired result that we’re looking for.

And sometimes it seems overwhelming to do that. But a plan to execute is always the starting point. You will hear that for me over and over again today. I want to help you differentiate three tasks that are often combined and. Uh, to one thing. Or they’re thought of as one, or they could even be clustered together and thought to happen simultaneously. Like you do all of them. It’s kind of like all or nothing, but really they are three completely separate things.

Organization is when you have intentionally given everything in your home.

A home within your home. So that means everything has a place it’s essentially giving everything a place to be put away and a place to be stored when it’s not in use. You always want to make sure that everything in your home has a location to go to when you are not using it. And that is one of the main things that makes your home appear to be organized and picked up in orderly because you don’t have stuff out and about all the time.

Good organization saves you time and it makes completing the next two things that we’re going to talk about. So you can easier. So we talk about organizing and then we are going to talk about tidying. Tidy and organizing can often be confused, but they’re not the same things. When. You organize, that means you are giving everything a home tidying is picking things up and putting them away. A lot of times we say phrases like I have to clean up, or I need to clean. But in reality, if you aren’t scrubbing dusting, vacuuming,

Or something along those lines, you aren’t actually cleaning. You’re not doing the cleaning. You are doing something called tidying. Tidying happens in little amounts of time. It’s quick. Tidying is not a big project. You’re not tackling an entire room. Tidying is. Picking up. It can be a big production if you let things get out of hand. But when you have created these intentional systems and routines for your home to maximize the benefits of organization,

And to simplify everything. And that’s what you bring the simplicity into your home. So that means that tidying is much faster. It’s a much faster process. You can quickly work your way through the home, picking up the out-of-place items and belongings and putting them away. Because you already did the organizing. You already have the exact location that you’ve designated for these items to go to when they our organized. Now, if you have spent the time organizing. That means that all of these things in your home have a place to go. You know, where that place is, you know, what basket something goes and you know what drawer it can be found in, you know, what closet shelf it lives on. So when you have things in your house, because every person that lives in a home uses the things in the home. When you have these things out,

You have that place to go put them away. And that’s when you are doing the tidying, think about dishes in the kitchen. These are things that we use on a regular basis. They can get stacked up on the counter, stacked up on the sakes. If we don’t have a good routine around how the dishes get washed and put away.

Then they will get stacked up. And this is when a dishes become a stressor and the kitchen becomes a stressful location because you’re in it often. And it’s often messy, but if you have taken the time to purge the unwanted things and the things that you are not using from your kitchen and your kitchen cabinets and drawers and pantry are all organized, that everything has a place to go. So it’s really easy to unload the dishwasher because everything has a place to go.

You’re not trying to stuff things in places where it doesn’t make sense or where there is not enough room or precariously stacking things. End of the course of the day, the dishes are made dirty dishes happen. They’re in the seat. Ready to be washed they’re put in the dishwasher. The dishwasher runs at night.

Just shoes are done. They are clean. Now it is time to put away that step where you’re putting the dishes away. It would fall under the tidying category. It’s not going to take a very long time. It’s going to be quick because things. Have organization, you have the organization in place. All of the dishes have a place where they belong when they’re not being used. So you can quickly put those dishes away.

In to their home. So cleaning and tidying and organizing all work together. When you have the organization figured out the tidying happens a lot quicker and there is less to tidy because we organize with a plan and we organize with a method. We think ease of retrieval when we organize and we put things, places where they make sense.

So when you have the organization established in your whole, but you tend to not leave things out as much and putting. Things away is easier because everything has a place to go. And when the clutter is removed, it’s more obvious when something has been left out. So you’ve spent the second or two putting something away so that the tidying isn’t as big of a deal. Now, the third thing in this is the cleaning.

Uh, that’s my least favorite part. Gleaning is it not my favorite thing? But when I really took the time to dial in my home organization, the cleaning became much easier. Maybe you have seen some of the mean was like, I have. About someone rushing around the house and picking up everything before like a cleaning person or a cleaning service comes over to have their house cleaned.

And it’s crazy, like the amount of time that someone has to spend picking up before the cleaning people are coming, or they say, oh, cleaning before the cleaning lady comes something along those lines and they make comments, like, why did I pay so much money to have to clean before the cleaning person shows up to clean?

Well, this, you, you can laugh at these memes and it’s funny. And if you have ever had someone or paid someone to clean your home, you know that this is true, but what you are doing in that situation that is not cleaning. Those people are not cleaning. They are picking up, they are tidying. They are doing the work before the cleaning has to happen.

And when you have an organized home and you have decluttered, so you have a clutter-free. Or very minimal clutter in your home, and it is organized the tidying or the picking up. Is significantly less. So it is easier to clean. It doesn’t take you as much time because you have eliminated those other two steps.

In this example, but most likely in the scenario where you are picking up and tidying before you clean. Probably. Sadly to say this, it probably involves a lot of shoving things. To an out of sight location in a drawer behind a door in a closed cabinet. Just out of sight, out of mind so that the cleaning can take place.

And we don’t want to do that. That’s where the organization comes in. You don’t have to do that when you have an organized home and you’ve taken the time to remove the clutter and actually organize things properly with a proven plan that works to do those things. So as you can see these three things really work together.

It’s significantly easier to keep the house clean. And the thing is that clean. And dusted and vacuumed and picked up. When you have good organization and also spending a few minutes a day, getting things back to your baseline, the baseline, the status quo that I always talk about by completing something like a daily tidy or a daily reset.

Uh, nightly pickup, even a weekly pickup, some type of reset, some type of task that lets you get everything back to the baseline. Those thing is make life easier. It keeps the house picked up, let the tidying help with the general upkeep and keep it at that baseline for you with just a couple minutes a day, spending the time to get it back to the baseline. And that allows yourself to make the cleaning significantly easier when it’s not your favorite thing, because it’s not my favorite thing to do.

And even if it’s like a completely dreaded task that you are just like, I am not interested in this. I don’t want to do this. I want to spend as little time as I possibly can. Doing the scrubbing and doing the mopping, doing the dusting and doing the actual tasks that are considered and classified as cleaning, then.

Spend the time organizing first. And then have something set in your home as part of your routines. To do a pickup, whether it’s nightly or weekly. I get the pickup and the tidying done so that you can spend less time cleaning. And more time doing the things that you actually want to be doing. Having a clean and orderly and organized home means spending less time on the upkeep, less time doing these dreaded tasks because we dial in the systems and routines that keep things orderly and organized so that we feel better in our homes. We can actually feel peaceful and relax and unwind in our homes instead of them adding to the stress.

Don’t forget to join us in the Facebook community. The link is in the description. And if you are looking for a way to have a weekly refresh, reset, restock kind of situation, there is a link in the podcast description where you can get the weekly and the monthly refresh principles, or you can even take a screenshot that I use. So that is something that there is a link in the podcast description. If you want to sign up for that. And then we will really get into that on some future episodes because.

The thing is that we do, like I talked about in this episode, they are the tidying and the picking up, and that really get you back to that baseline. Are super, super helpful. They’re imperative to keeping your house picked up an orderly and all of that. Thanks for listening i’ll meet you back here next week for another episode of the intentional edit podcast

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Lauren is the founder of Intentional Edit, a home organization and lifestyle company focused on consciously editing to create efficient and organized spaces. Lauren believes that a functional home that looks and feels good has a positive influence on all aspects of life. Creating systems that allow for the home to function more efficiently, therefore, eliminating most of the clutter and chaos is her priority. While trends come and go organization is always in style!

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