What do you prefer: give yourself a paunch to tidy up and clean for several hours or just 15 minutes? The answer is obvious, right? Well, that's what Marla Cilley (aka 'FlyLady') proposes, the guru of order who threatens to dethrone Marie Kondo and who is already sweeping in.
Keys to the FlyLady method
Both seek the same thing: that cleanliness and order cease to be a nightmare, but from diametrically opposite directions. While Kondo recommends doing it all at once and spending as much time as necessary to get rid of it, Cilley defends that 15-minute batches a day are enough to keep the house tidy, because it doesn't accumulate clutter and dirt, and you save the marathon cleaning days.
FlyLady method essentials
- Go by parts. FlyLady proposes to take it easy and go by steps instead of pretending to order and clean in a few hours what has been soiled in days, weeks and even months.
- Divide the work. For Cilley, going from one environment to another without strategy or doing several things at the same time is doomed to failure (something in which the author of The Magic of Order and the Netflix reality show agrees ). He argues that the most effective thing is to fully concentrate on a single room or a certain task: the bathroom, the kitchen, dusting, sweeping, cleaning the windows.
- Black spots. Once the work has been divided, he suggests that you identify the most problematic points in the house and dedicate two minutes a day to put them in order.
- 15 minute slots. It also challenges you to dedicate 15 minutes a day to picking up / ordering a single room in the house. This makes it more bearable and ensures that it is also more effective.
- Create your own routines. And distribute them throughout the day. For FlyLady, the key to the success of its method lies in turning small actions into habits and routines that we do without thinking in the morning, afternoon and night: stretching the bed and drying the shower screen in the morning, not letting things accumulate in the sink or after cooking or eating, pick up what has been scattered around the room before going to bed …
- To plan. And finally, it recommends creating a weekly plan to keep an organized control of the tasks you have to do and thus not waste time or disperse. Do you dare to try it?
