Welcome back to day five of our 12 Days of Chaos at the Joy Loving Home podcast. This is a special series I'm running here for Christmas preparedness. It is, excuse me, it is a nice companion to the ADHD Christmas guide that I have been running the last two years. That guide can still be accessed. I can put a link to it actually in the show notes. The easiest place to get everything completely for free is to join my podcast community at bit.ly slash joylovinghomecommunity.
And the ADHD Christmas Guide is this non-linear pending list of tasks and a way to brainstorm so that you can tick off all the boxes that need to be ticked off at Christmas time to get yourself prepared and to quit procrastinating.
This 12 Days of Chaos is just sort of a companion that we're having a little fun with that is just a spinoff on the 12 Days of Christmas song where we are tackling five minutes at a pop of items around our house just to keep the house up and rolling while all of the Christmas chaos is happening. So with today being day five, and I'm using that loosely, if you have been following along closely, you will know I skipped Saturday and Sunday.
I don't know if you're listening to this on Monday when I'm posting it, or if you are listening later and you're just playing marathon catch-up because you could do days one through four, one through five in a single day and just pick up wherever.
But I do take weekends off because I designed sort of being an entrepreneur and having my own organizing business and then branching into podcasting and doing all of the online virtual organizing and memberships that I do around the fact that first and foremost, I just love being a mom. So I don't do things on weekends. And my point of sharing this is to say our ADHD brains can have an all or nothing mentality.
And a lot of the type A focus that you hear when you're tackling things in, Be especially aware of this in the new year while people are goal setting for the new year. Be very careful with this need to be consistent. If you don't do things consistently, you won't see results. And okay, I don't buy into that. I actually think using the word consistently in our lives can cause us to completely shut off because if we miss a day, then we're like, well, that's over.
I've blown it. That's it. It's over. I think we are much better off having the word continuously or continuity. That's what I'm looking for. Have some continuity. So if you stopped on a Friday and you want to pick it up on a Monday, just pick up where you left off. It's really okay. The fact that you didn't do anything for two straight days does not end the world. So in this case, I took a break on Saturday and Sunday. I actually did some things in the background.
And the fun part of that with these nonlinear lists is that I can sit down with my Christmas tree where I'm coloring in the balls. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I actually do videos of this in the group. So you can have visuals that go along with these podcasts. But I can sit down now with my Christmas ornaments and I can say, oh, actually over the weekend I completed our Christmas cards. So let me color that ornament in. Oh, and I finished decorating the exterior
of my house. I had skipped over that one. Let me color that one in. I haven't done this yet, but let's pretend I had organized the gifts list and now I'm ready to go buying. I could color that in. It's okay to give yourself credit after the fact when you realize you've done some of the things that are on the list. You don't have to read something, then do it, then check it off. You can go about life remembering things, doing things you don't even remember
were on the list. and then when you sit back down with the list again a few days later, check off anything that's now done. There's no magic in checking off the list as you go. Be excited by the reward of the fact that the list is done either way. Okay, so having taken this break, we are not going to have lost momentum. We are certainly not starting over. We're just picking up where we left off and we're plowing forward.
So with today being the fifth day of chaos, we are calling this the five-minute tidy. This is the free space on the bingo card. This is your wild card in your deck. This is stop, look around, anything that immediately draws your attention, go to that and tidy it. Set the timer for five minutes and go to town. So you've done your five-minute tidy, then you have your four clear surfaces. So set the timer for five minutes again and find a surface that's driving you
crazy and clear it. It could be a kitchen island. It can be a table in the living room. It can be the entryway floor. That's a surface. Then move on to a five-minute timer at a clean bathroom space. So if you were with me in the video, I chose three spaces in a bathroom to clean, and I did a mirror, sink, and toilet. And that alone will make a bathroom feel better even if you don't get to scrub the tub this time around.
Then two fluffy pillows is about making a bed or if all the beds happen to be made or they're in the middle of being changed and you don't want to deal with that and slow yourself down with your five minute timer today. Go straighten up the couch in the living room and fluff a couple pillows and make it look like it would if you were having guests over.
And then the final one is to focus on your so that to set your priorities and that is going back to that calendar looking at it making sure there's nothing that is escaping your attention that is such a good reminder for us to keep looking back at our our lists and in this case the little printables that I've provided that have to do with your ADHD Christmas or your 12 days of chaos. I hope you're enjoying this little series as we continue to plow through the 12 days.
I'll be back here again for a short episode tomorrow. Until then, continue to choose joy.