"How to Keep House While Drowning" Gems
What I love about this book:
It’s a revolutionary and gentle, self-loving approach to cleaning and organizing.
I place this book right up there with The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up as a favorite for me. How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis, excellently highlights an important and essential message about home functionality and our feelings tied to “keeping a tidy house.”
Another thing I love about this book is that it is specifically designed with neurodivergent readers in mind — the hardback book has taken into consideration the font, spacing, bolding of main points, brevity of chapters, and offers a shortcut abridged journey to reading the book. It is short and comprehensive.
It is written with the experiences of people with executive dysfunction, perfectionism, trauma, depression, fatigue, overwhelm, and lack of support, among other things, in mind.
When I posted about this book on Instagram, highly recommending it, I received replies back like:
⭐️ Read on for my top takeaways and why I highly recommend this book: ⬇️
Cleaning and organizing are care tasks. And care tasks are morally neutral.
Davis describes care tasks as the “chores of life” that seem noncomplex, but actually require a lot of work, energy, planning, and regular maintenance when you take into account all the invisible and visible steps involved. Examples include: cooking, cleaning, laundry, and doing the dishes.
Often times, when theses care tasks are not completed, we feel shame, lazy, unmotivated, or like we’re failing as an adult. However, Davis contends that these care tasks are morally neutral. Their completion does not signal anything about how “good” of a person we are. We are the ones assigning a negative meaning.
You don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.
Care tasks are morally neutral and care tasks are functional. When we see care tasks for its functional means, rather than living up to a moral character code, we can more easily create systems that work for us and set our own standards of care.
Instead of getting stuck in the performance of keeping the home to a standard that you think you’re supposed to, you keep a home that is functional to you in your current season of life.
Focus on the most foundational functionality first: keeping your body or space safe and healthy. These are the basic reasons many of us want want a clean and organized home, but we can lose sight of that when inundated with pretty photos of uniform bins and a spotless floor.
Try the 5 Things Tidying Method when feeling overwhelmed.
Davis breaks down a messy room into 5 categories and believes it is best to tackle them in this order:
Trash - gather all trash and take it all out at the very end
Dishes - return all dishes to the kitchen, but do not focus on cleaning them yet
Laundry - pick up clothes from the floor and place in laundry basket, but do not focus on doing the laundry yet
Things that have a place, but are not in their place - reset one space or area at a time and return these items to their designated homes
Things that do not have a place - go through these items and either donate them or give them a home
After this, you can focus on cleaning the dishes or doing the laundry.
Even if you don’t get through the entire list in one day, you have accomplished the most basic requirements of keeping your home functional and livable: you’ve removed health hazards and trash that attracts bugs.
The division of labor: the rest should be fair.
The goal in a partnership is to make sure that the amount of rest is fair for both partners.
Instead of asking “how do we make the work equal?”, ask “how do we ensure that we both get rest?” (Check out my Fair Play blog about unicorn space for related concepts).🦄
Self-compassion will be your guiding light.
I talk a lot with my clients about giving themselves grace. Giving themselves permission. And Davis’ message echos Brené Brown’s: we are all worthy. Productivity, contributions, and tidiness levels do not affect that core of worthiness. And as with all things, the more we care and love on ourselves, the easier it is to face obstacles, and care tasks like summiting laundry mountain. 💛
Resources:
“How to Keep House While Drowning” by KC Davis