You have probably heard about the saying that trying to clean your house with young children is like trying to brush your teeth while eating Oreos. And if you haven't heard that, I'm sure you can relate to the fact that that's a pretty accurate description of what it's like. So what kind of difference can these little five-minute tidies you hear about make for real?
What is five minutes going to do in the house that you're looking around at right now, feeling like it's just not enough to make a dent? And so why bother? Well, in the Joy Loving Home membership community, we did five-minute tidying challenges all month, and the results are in. Let's talk about what we discovered right after this. A wise person once said, everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it's stupid.
Well fish, quit trying to climb trees while getting advice from well-intentioned monkeys. It's time to jump in the water and learn how to swim with the current of your life. I'm Joy, a professional organizer, mom of four, and fellow fish brain. If you're looking for a place to get understanding, encouragement, and ideas for your home that actually fit how your brain thinks, then I'm glad you're here. Let's ditch the type A advice and embrace what makes our brains and our homes unique.
Together, we could have a joy-loving home. If you are not aware, the Joy Loving Home podcast community actually has a membership option in which we get together in a private Facebook group. And every single month, I offer a new challenge. And on Mondays, I come in and kind of get us revved up about what's going on in the challenge. And then Wednesdays, I have what are called Work With Me Wednesdays.
And because I've got folks all across the country and Australia, I do it a lot of different time zones so that everybody hopefully has a chance to jump in and give the different challenges a try with the accountability of being on a Zoom call, body doubling other people. And if the thought of being on a Zoom call is frightening to you, the option always exists to keep your camera off and your microphone off. But to know that others are there working actually is super motivating to work as well.
But I will tell you, we have like the loveliest group of ladies in this community. And there is no judging. There is only encouragement. encouragement and just, I have loved getting to know folks. And if you're like, oh, I hate to join things that already are in progress. I don't know, we're really welcoming. I don't think it's an issue. And I would more than happily help you jump in and feel like you've been a part of the group all along.
But saying that, I will tell you the membership is currently open through September 30th, if you're listening to this before then, and you just go to joylovinghome.com slash membership, it's $10 a month, and you can cancel anytime. But if it's something you'd love to just jump in, think about how you would have all of October, November and December to already start feeling better about things before a new year even arrives, which will be the next time it opens.
So just sort of sharing that that's out there. But just to give you a little snapshot, shot every single month, we just do a new challenge. And they're all sort of experiments. I don't have an answer of exactly what you're going to get out of it. Because everyone's house is different. Everyone's life is different. Everyone's brain is different. We all will get different results from different challenges. Some of us love one and not another.
But it's sort of fun to just know you're going to jump into an experiment and see where it leads without this hammering of there's one way to do things and you have to do it consistently every day. It's just... I don't know, it's just a fun way to shake things up every month, and they're always different. And by the way, I now edit my podcasts with AI. I started that in episode 200. So if you're like, I listened to your old ones, and they sound a little different than now.
It was just such a great time saver. But I have both dogs with me today. I live on, well, just outside of Atlanta. And we're having the whole tropical storm fringe or whatever roll through. So I have both dogs next to me. One is panting heavily because she hates rain. So my apologies if there's like weird noise in the background. I don't know once this is edited, if you'll hear it or not, but just letting you know that's what that is in case.
So anyway, jumping into what difference does five minutes make? Well, this month, we were doing a challenge where I threw out five spaces and we were to set our timers and just do five minutes in each space. And when the timer went off, you just walked away, just walked to the next step. All that meant is in the course of a day, you would have 25 minutes. It could be all in a row. It could be I had five minutes here, I had five minutes there, and I picked a different spot each time.
And we just wanted to see is this whole do a five minute tidy at the end of your day or do a five minute tidy at the beginning of day or all it takes is a five minute tidy and the upkeep will be amazing. And so we just we were experimenting with that this month in the group. And it's it was interesting. We we the results are and I know it's not quite the end of the month, but just kind of letting you know how it's gone.
And for me, it was fun because when I do all the different work with me Wednesdays, there's days where I would do this four times a day, five times a day. And so it's been neat to see the cumulative effect over the course of a month and over the course of a day like that. But part of the reason I wanted to focus on this, particularly for our brains, and when I say our brains, if you listen to the intro, I lovingly recall us, lovingly call us fish brains.
Some of us are diagnosed with ADHD. Some of us suspect we have ADHD. All of us feel a little scattered with our skillset at home. And so one of the sort of. Markers of having ADHD is this time blindness. And what it can lead to is, it's funny, it works both ways. You can assume that five minutes is not enough to do anything. So you do nothing. Or you assume you can do all kinds of stuff in a very short amount of time. And then you have a reality check when that much time has gone by.
And you're like, oh, this is taking longer than I thought. So we have a little bit of both. So this month's experiment allowed us to go, what does five minutes actually do in my kitchen? What does five minutes actually do in trying to tidy up a bathroom? What is five minutes in my family room? How much impact can I really truly make in five minutes time? And sometimes it was surprising. I mean, like, like, holy cow, I did all of that in five minutes. Why have I been putting this off?
And sometimes it was, oh, that went really fast. Holy cow. But each time we would stop and move on. And the reason I like this stopping, and I know this is probably counterintuitive, because another sort of, interesting facet of the ADHD brain is that we will complete things to like 90% and never quite finish. So here I am asking you to walk away with things unfinished. But I do think for those of us with kids, it's more the reality than not, we are interrupted all the time.
And that's okay. Okay, because if you listen to my last episode, it's not the interruption that should drive us crazy. The interruption is life and we should embrace like, oh, life needs me now. And that's okay because that's actually my priority. But we have, when you have young children, you are literally constantly in the need to pivot and to be okay with it.
And I just think it's worthwhile to see it's still worth doing those five minutes, even if you have to stop and move on to something else. Because progress in tiny little bites is worthwhile because that also helps us push against this all or nothing mentality that our brains can have. That, well, if I can't do it exactly right with every single detail of cleaning up that room, why am I even doing it?
And so we tend to put these things off and let them pile up and pile up until maybe somebody's coming to visit our house. And suddenly we're swamped with believing keeping a house is this hours and hours long exhausting task because all we've ever done is put everything off until we can do it completely right." I'm using like air quotes there. But anyway, so this little experiment was really worth it to see what five-minute progress can actually make.
Personally, for me, I was shocked at how this sort of repetition of just doing these five minutes nearly daily. I'm never consistent with anything. And I also kind of think that's great for us to see that these rules we hear about keeping our house is like, if you'll just consistently do this every day, it will add up in your house will look amazing. Well, what if you do it some days? What if you do it most days? What if you do it occasionally?
Is it still worth doing? And so for those of us that were involved in the challenge this month, some of us only did it on the Wednesdays because we needed the actual, the extra accountability of these work with me Wednesdays. I actually started a little Voxer group inside the membership as well. So anybody who wanted to join the Voxer group, and if you're not sure what that is, I'm saying V as in Victor, O-X-E-R.
It's a free app that works like a walkie talkie that kind of holds your voice until you push play versus being a live walkie talkie. But that was a fun extra incentive when it wasn't a Wednesday to have someone in the group suddenly click their little Voxer button and say, hey, I'm going to start mine. Is anybody else out there and wants to do it with me? And then somebody else could pipe in and go, oh, yeah, I'll join.
And it got you up and moving. So that was like an added layer that was sort of fun. And that was a total new experiment for this month. But it was fun. And we may add that to our challenges in the future. But anyway, this sort of inconsistent activity over the course of the month was amazingly helpful. And what it led for me in my own life is I am about to host 10 extra people this weekend.
And normally, that means today, Thursday, as I'm recording this, I am beginning some of the cleaning and trying to finish everything on a scramble on Friday as people are driving into town. And because I did all these little tiny upkeeps all month long, Things were so much farther along so that today I actually think I'll finish my house, which is really revolutionary if you know me.
And then tomorrow I have to think about is like what I want to do as far as making sure I have food in place and even cleaned out. Both fridges yesterday, I have like the fridge in the kitchen, I have an extra one in the basement for when we have extra company, and I need to like have all the excess stuff. All of that is in place. Like I, it's, it is really novel to me. And I really attribute these tiny little bits of five minutes here and five minutes there to being this far along.
So I don't know, So if you're listening to this and you're like, hey, I think that's kind of cool. I'm about to explain exactly which areas we did and how it worked. And that way, if you want to try it without the membership, by all means, try it because I think it would be fantastic. All right. I just want to read you one other thing. I kind of reached out to the community and I said, hey, guys, I'm about to do a podcast about our experiment
this month. does anybody want to weigh in with how it worked for them? So shout out to Jessica. Thank you for commenting in my group. But I just wanted to read what she said as well. So you're not hearing just my thoughts. She said, it's been really eye opening training my brain to see what can actually be done in five minutes and how much it adds up.
Today, I was reflecting on how doing the five minute bits makes me not only stay focused, but to focus on the essential pieces of the task, not doing it at a high level of perfection or overthinking it. I've also enjoyed jumping rooms. The movement and change of scenery has been nice and makes me want to go back and wrap up tasks. I love racing timers. The gamification side makes it really motivating, so it's a good fit for the way I'm wired.
And on a final note, tonight we didn't get to tackle the dishes from dinner until after the kids were down. A month ago, I would have called it a night and dealt with it tomorrow morning. However, with this month's challenge, I've seen how the pieces really added up to 10 or 15 minutes and I tackled it.
So if that doesn't sort of tell you that this kind of experiment can be really rewarding and it doesn't mean that she's gonna do this forever or I'm gonna do this forever and then I have to feel bad about it because now it's a failed experiment. This is a successful experiment experiment, that you can revisit again, or if your brain gets bored of it, you can say, I'm going to take a break, and maybe I try it again in January.
Because if you're in the group, I'm moving on to something new October 1. But this was still worthwhile. All the lessons learned from it are awesome. And those of us that are in the Voxer group may still, you know, go, hey, I'm going to do my 25 minutes before starting the October challenge. Anybody here with me? So So if you want to give this a shot at home, just, you know, Listen to these steps, maybe jot them down on your phone and give it a try.
Just see what happens over the course of a stretch. Try it for a week. So these were the categories. We had kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, main living space, and any hot spot. And you just set your timer for five minutes. And when you go off, when it goes off, just literally walk away, start at the next space. What we did then is if any of us had the time, we would reset the timer and the second half of our time, we would set a timer for 25 minutes and really go deep with something.
Some of the folks were like, what I did in that 25 minutes was I revisited all five spaces and I quote unquote finished where I had to stop. Other people were like, I feel great about the fact that the house had a quick tidy and And now I'm actually spending 25 minutes doing something I really wanted to do or deep cleaning a different space that we didn't touch. So all of that could be another podcast because this one's getting really long.
But to see the contrast of a 25-minute timer against having just done sets of five minutes is pretty astounding. It's amazing how long that feels. But anyway, that was literally our September challenge. We just gave that a go for the month of September. So if that, again, sounds fun to you and you're like, hey, I could do that. That might be fun. Do it yourself. It's okay. You don't need to join the group.
But if you're having the best of intentions and you're realizing this sounds cool, but I'm going to move on to the next podcast or I'm out walking or I'm out driving and I'm going to forget about this by the time I'm home and you want the extra accountability, then again go to joylivinghome.com slash membership and consider joining us because the accountability in that group is worth its weight in gold all right hope you all have the best weekend and continue to choose joy.