January Tidy Zones - An Hour A Day Keeps The Mess Away!

January Tidy Zones:


TZ 1: The Entrance, Front Porch and Dining Area (January 1 – 2)
TZ 2: The Kitchen (January 5 – 9)
TZ 3: The Bathroom(s) and one Extra Room (January 12 – 16)
TZ 4: The Master Bedroom (January 19 – 23)
TZ 5: The Living Room (January 26 – 30)

The Buzz: One Hour - 30 minutes a day "in the current tidy zone" and that's it! No more! You're going to spend the other 30 minutes "buzzing through the other zones tidying up (but saying to yourself, "this is not your week, I'll get to you soon." and then move on . . . no deep-cleaning in other tidy zones!!!
IF you have time for serious deep-cleaning, well . . . that's a different story. It must come AFTER the Tidy Zone work is done for the day.

November Tidy - Zone

These are the Tidy- Zones for November - mark your calendars:

Tidy Zone 1: The Entrance,Front Porch and Dining Room (November 1 -3 )
Tidy Zone 2: The Kitchen (November 5 - 10)
Tidy Zone 3: The Bathroom and One Extra Room (November 12 - 17)
Tidy Zone 4: The Master Bedroom (November 19 - 24)
Tidy Zone 5: The Living Room (November 26 - 30)

Spend no more than 20 minutes per day in the Tidy-Zone!
Sundays are set aside for church and family time - no cleaning!

First Tidy Steps

Bee Tidy has divided the home up into 5 different zones. This is done for the simple reason that our calendar has 5 weeks in a month (albeit, the first and/or last week has less days than the other 4). Don't worry if you think you have more than 5 zones in your own home ... everyone does ... ha! But follow the Bee Tidy Zones anyway. These zones will hit on all the major living areas of your home. Each week, you will work in a different zone. Each month, you will repeat all the zones. In a few months, you will notice that the main parts of your home will look so tidy!!. This will then motivate you to tackle some of the "other" areas of your home.



So here is how the month of October looks:



These are the zones for October - mark your calendars:


Zone 1: The Entrance, Front Porch and Dining Room (October 1 - 5)
Zone 2: The Kitchen (October 8 - 12)
Zone 3: The Bathroom and One Extra Room (October 15 - 19)
Zone 4: The Master Bedroom (October 22 - 26)
Zone 5: The Living Room (October 29 - 31)



When you first start zone work in Tidy Zones, don't try to spend anymore than 15 minutes per day decluttering in the current zone, and 15 minutes cleaning in that zone. That's it! Tidy Steps - like baby steps! Set your timer for 15 minutes and clear out those things that you don't use or love, and then set it for 15 minutes again for the cleaning time. Before you start, review the rules of zone cleaning:

Be fully dressed all the way to comfy shoes before you start.
Your daily cleaning chores should be finished and preferably weekly vacuuming done.
The room has to be fairly straight.
Do not pull out more than you can put back in 1 hour.
Clean one drawer or one pile at a time.
Do a little every day. Don't try to accomplish this in one day. You will burn out and will hate this system. TidySteps!
Set your timer and work for 15 minutes. That's all. It did not get junked up in one day and it won't get clean in one day either. Patience and BabySteps. You can do this.

Walt Disney Had It Right!

Here is what Walt Disney's had to say about positive guest services at his new theme park in 1955:

Some of the activities a Disney cast member (employee) cannot do while "on stage" at a Disney theme park.
Eat
Drink
Smoke
Sleep
Sit down
Chew gum
Lean against a wall or a railing,
Fold his or her arms.
Does this seem extreme? Of course it does. But when it comes to customer service, it makes perfect sense. Imagine how a potential guest would feel when walking up to a cast member doing one of the above no-nos.
Making sure the cast-member is courteous and efficient is key while "onstage" at a Disney theme park. It helps create a positive guest experience whenever a guest interacts with an employee.
"The first year (of Disneyland) I leased out the parking concession, brought in the usual security guards -- things like that -- but soon realized my mistake. I couldn't have outside help and still get over my idea of hospitality. So now we recruit and train every one of our employees. I tell the security police, for instance, that they are never to consider themselves cops. They are there to help people. The visitors are our guests. It's like running a fine restaurant. Once you get the policy going, it grows." -- Walt Disney
The cast members who follow these rules develop a sense of pride about their work. When these rules were first put in place, they quickly began to believe in the need to sacrifice their personal convenience in order to be part of something special. Guess what? It works!

Snow White & the 7 Dwarfs:
Sleepy, Sneezy, Happy, Grumpy, Doc, Dopey & Bashful.

Just for fun, let's see how these guys may have approached being tidy.

We'll start with Sleepy:

It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom. - Aristotle

Are morning people born or made?
If morning people are born, then there's nothing to be done about it, but if a morning person can be made, then how and why?
It seems there are two main schools of thought about sleep patterns. One is that you should go to bed and get up at the same times every day. It’s like having an alarm clock on both ends — you try to sleep the same hours each night. This seems practical for living in modern society. We need predictability in our schedules. And we need to ensure adequate rest.
The second school says you should listen to your body’s needs and go to bed when you’re tired and get up when you naturally wake up. This approach is rooted in biology. Our bodies should know how much rest we need, so we should listen to them.

More about this later ...

Bee Happy and Whistle While You Work

Happiness is not something akin to a celestial body to pursue and catch. In fact, happiness often comes on us unawares while we are helping others.
An old Hindu proverb pointedly and beautifully expresses this philosophy on happiness: "Help thy brother's boat across, and lo! Thine own has reached the shore."
"Pursue Love, yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts." (1 Corinthians 14:1a)
One psychologist by the name of William James put it this way, "I don't sing because I'm happy, I'm happy because I sing."
Some of us tend to wait for happiness to somehow take up residence on our doorstep, not even realizing that if we act as if we are happy, we will make others happy.
William James put it this way: "Action seems to follow feeling, but really ... action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not."
This is powerful advice. Now, here is the final step to William James's philosophy: "Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there!"

Tidy Zones

Today, I want to begin a talk about something I learned from two women called the "Slob Sisters." Back in the late 1970's, I read and reread a book by Pam Young and Peggy Jones, entitled "Sidetracked Home Executives." They later wrote another book, "Get Your Act Together," with a more streamlined approach to their same system of organization. This is where I was introduced to the concept of Zones and a Weekly Plan.
The Amish worked up the singsong limerick that kept them washing on Monday and ironing on Tuesday, etc. In other words, a weekly plan. They said, "Think of a weekly plan as a disposable guide to focusing your life for seven days at a time: In a typical week, you will need to devote a certain amount of time to do housework, play, be with your family, rest, run errands, and do paperwork."
So, our weekly plan should include the following: A Play Day, A Desk Day, A Full Cleaning Day, A half Cleaning Day, A Go-FER Day, A Family Work Day, and A Family Play Day. Traditionally, certain "women's chores" were assigned a day of the week. You might be stitching a set of dish towels (I have a set I'm working on right now) or making a "sampler" of a cute kitty doing the chores, and so on.

Here is a list of the "traditional" chores.
Monday - Washing
Tuesday - Ironing
Wednesday - Mending
Thursday - Marketing
Friday - Baking
Saturday - Cleaning
Sunday - Day of Worship

And here is another one from many years ago:
Washing on Monday
Ironing and Mending on Tuesday
Kitchen storeroom, dairy on Wednesdays
Bedrooms on Thursday
Living rooms on Friday
Kitchen only, cleaning silver, changing beds, Saturday
Sunday was traditionally a day of rest. No one would dream of doing anything but the barest necessities. The maids used to say that if you sewed on Sunday, you would have to unpick the stitches with your nose in Hell, after you died. No doubt, they believed it! (Yikes!)

"Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without." In days gone by, this was the motto of a good housewife. Seems like a good one for today, as well. Confusion as to what to do concerning house-cleaning and when, nearly always arises from lack of a system, and no preparations have been made for when the dreaded day arrives.

Stay tuned for more about Tidy Zones