So we have reached day nine of our 12 Days of Chaos, which is just a fun little game we are playing with the 12 Days of Christmas song to do quick five-minute tidying tasks around our house to try and just keep it somewhat on track while the activities of Christmas chaos are just rolling on around us. It helps us focus for just a few minutes each day. We're not looking for perfection. We're not scrubbing the house from top to
bottom. We're just having a little fun in a Christmas-themed way to keep the house in control. Before I jump into what today's five-minute task is, I just wanted to say one thing really quickly about loopholes. Loopholes are a huge gift to the all-or-nothing ADHD brain, and they are a wonderful gift to those of us who have convinced ourselves that we're gonna be really good at being consistent with something. It's okay. We're just not good at consistent.
And I want you to keep that in mind as you head into the new year and resolution type things are swirling all around you. You don't need to pick out something that is about being consistent to something every single day. You need to craft whatever goals you have for the new year to have lots of loopholes. Loopholes are not anything to be disappointed in or ashamed by. They are your tool and your friend. So to put it in a concrete little...
Bite-sized thought on this little 12 days of chaos we're doing now. If you are stumbling upon this podcast in day nine, and you're like, oh, this would have been fun to do if I had started nine days ago, but now there's no way to go back. I'm not going to do this. I could print the downloadable, but I'd have to leave over half of it empty. I'm just not even going to do anything, which is what gets us into trouble to
not making progress because we have this all or nothing. it has to be right mindset. Well, the lovely little loophole of this particular task is if you still wanted to jump into my free podcast community, which you get to by going to bit.ly slash joylovinghomecommunity, and I'll put the link in the show note. If you were to download it today and you have your printable and you wanted to quote unquote catch up, You still could.
The lovely loophole of this particular task, and I always make sure all of my themes that I do over in my membership group every month, for one, it's nice to have a different goal every single month so that we can just know there's a stopping point because a lot of times you can do anything for a little while and then you fizzle out.
So the themes change every month, every theme has a loophole to get through, and it reignites and reenergizes our brain and we keep very small deadlines so that that urgency factor of our brains is always firing. And just as an aside, if you're interested in the membership, it is currently open. You go to joylovinghome.com slash membership, and you can join over there for $10 a month. And we have just accountability and encouragement and all the different themes.
But my roundabout way of trying to get you to understand how loopholes work, if you were to download the PDF and start today, you can do day one in five minutes. And then you can do day two in 10 minutes and you can do day three in 15 minutes. So in 30 minutes, you've made three of the days up and then you could jump in and try today and then tomorrow bank a couple extra days and then the next day bank a couple extra days because I'm guessing you have more than one bedroom in your house.
So you have more than one bed you could make. You have more than one bathroom in your house.
So you have more than one bathroom you could clean up in a single day. you might spend five minutes in a kitchen and when you have to repeat the kitchen task I'm betting there's still more than five minutes of things to do within your kitchen so this is a type of task where it's not like I'm saying I have to do 20 push-ups every day and then I fall behind and I want to catch up and suddenly I'm doing 100 push-ups in a day and that seems really impossible or I am going to I was trying to think
of something you can't keep redoing oh just make your own bed every day and then you aren't going to unmake it and remake it five times on the same day to play catch up. So you need to craft as you're thinking about the new year and the excitement of starting over and starting fresh and finally doing it this time. Think about how to. Are useful to your brain and that work with you, not against you. And just as a little heads up, I will be doing a lot of those things as we get closer to January.
And so if that's something that interests you, please follow this podcast so that you're not missing out when new episodes pop up because I am not consistent with each day and time I put them out. That's who I am. I'm not going to work against myself. So anyway, let's jump into what today was. Today is the ninth day of Christmas and we are doing nine toys a tidying. So my one little tidbit on this, set the timer. You can use your kids to help.
Just spend five minutes and see what you can do to tidy up all the toys. While you're tidying them up, it might be a really great idea to have a box handy. And if you can encourage your children to, hey, there might be some new gifts coming very soon. And perhaps we should clear some out and donate them to some kids that don't have any. So it might be a great way to clear the way so that you will have space for new toys.
And as just a recap without actually singing, you want to go back and you haven't downloaded the PDF, but you want to listen to this and see what the tasks were. It was nine toys of tidying, eight dishes of washing, seven things of dusting, six floors of sweeping, a five minute tidy, four clear surfaces, three scrubbed bathrooms, two fluffy pillows, and a so that to set priorities. So if you're curious about it and you want to go back and listen to the others,
feel free. but if you just want to jump in with your loophole and start here, go for it. Until next time, continue to choose joy.