Consistency - Why it's important

I can think of a million things that I would rather do than clean house. It's not difficult. It's just painfully monotonous and never ending. I can do all the dishes and laundry in the house and there will be piles of both within a few hours. So what's the point of doing it every day when you will just have it to do every day in the future?

The secret is consistency. There is a difference between washing one load of dishes and having to do 3 loads before you find the bottom of the sink. There's a difference in quickly folding a load of laundry and taking half the day to fold a week's worth. There's a difference in being able to take 15 minutes to pick up the house and it taking 2-3 days to even be able to vacuum.

Consistently doing the house cleaning builds slow momentum. Let's say, your living room is just trashed from kids being home from school and the Christmas festivities. You may think you have to wait for a huge chunk of time to make a dent, but start with what you can do today. Pick up all the trash. Tomorrow, pick up the trash and the dishes. The next day, pick up trash, dishes, and any dirty clothes. The next day, pick up the trash, dishes, dirty clothes, and misplaced books. The next day, pick up the trash, dishes, dirty clothes, books and toys. In just 5 days, your living room is infinitely better with no more than 15 minutes of work each day. The key is not the 15 minutes. The key is doing it EVERY day. Because let it go for 2-3 days and especially if you have a lot of kids like me, you will have to start all over again. It makes you fill like a hamster in a wheel. A never ending cycle that doesn't get better.

So if you are making a schedule, make it work for you in a way that builds daily consistency. My minimum effort in each room is to pick up 8 things that are out of place. My minimum for dishes is one dishwasher load loaded and unloaded. My minimum for laundry is one load of laundry a day. Some days require more than that but by continuing with the minimum even on the busy days, I'm keeping the momentum going.

Some days, you may have to reduce an activity to make it work into your daily schedule. I try to get 15 minutes of exercise on the Wii Fit every day. I haven't been consistent with it. I had thought I was being mostly consistent one week and realized that I had only done it twice out of seven days. So, my minimum is now 5 minutes of step aerobics. Once, I am consistent with that amount, I will try to raise it to 10 then to 15 and up to 30. I was waiting around for time to do 15 minutes and wasting those 5 minute blocks of time.

Gonna start tomorrow with some activities that I have listed in Remember the Milk app.