If you are listening to today's podcast anytime near when I dropped it, which is November 25th, 2024, that means that the season of a whole lot of hosting is upon us with the holidays coming up. And I am going to chat today about three very realistic options to ditch the clutter and prep yourself for some company quickly. So let's dig into that.
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. Just for the record, these particular decluttering strategies would work anytime at all.
But just the motivation of the possibility of company coming and the urgency of a tight timeline will make these work even better, particularly for our brains. So let's jump right in. There's no time to waste. Option one, I call the dig and dump. This is literally the fastest, easiest, and least helpful way to prepare yourself for company. So picture an excavator.
It is that a big piece of construction machinery that scoops up a load of things with dirt, spins around, and deposits it in a dump truck to be carted away. This is literally what you're doing. So in light of Thanksgiving being the closest holiday, let's just picture ourselves in the dining room. Table is covered with stuff. We have no time to spare, and we just need to prep for company.
So we're going to grab an empty cardboard box or a laundry basket or those giant blue ikea bags are awesome for this and if you ever are near an ikea and you don't buy any of them you've you've wasted your time in an ikea they fold up so small and yet they hold so much and they're incredibly durable hold on to them for when you get ready to haul stuff to college dorms let me tell you those things come in handy. But I'm digressing.
What I'm wanting you to do is literally get whatever the container is, which in this case is your dump truck, slide it under the edge of the table and just start sliding things into it. Yes, I said this was the least helpful. The only thing you've got going for you here is later after Thanksgiving's over and you're like, where's that thing I had on the table? I put it there because it was important and now I can't find anything.
You need to go hunt down that box, basket, Ikea bag that you dumped everything into and you need to start finding it.
Here's the thing there is no shame in this option and the reason there is no shame in this option is because I am beyond beyond beyond proud of you for deciding in spite of everything I'm hosting because sincerely the most important thing about all of these holidays is the fellowship that you're getting by getting people together that is what life is about that is sincerely what I mean when I talk about a joy-loving home, it is not about the stuff. It is not about the aesthetic.
It is not about anything, but preparing your house in such a way where you feel excited to have people over and can enjoy just being around people in your home. That's kind of the end goal. So again, no shame in this. This is literally a legitimate strategy to keep yourself moving and engaging in life because the alternative is to shut down and not be part of life. And I don't want that for you. So dig and dump, totally reasonable. All right, number two, this one is called the sort and stash.
Now the sort and stash is a similar tactic as the last one, but this time you're actually gonna use that big table surface. You're gonna just start sorting like things together and whatever makes sense. Oh, that goes in the living room. Oh, that's a basement item. Oh, that's a bathroom item. Oh, that's trash. Oh, that's, oh, I put that there because it was broken. And you know what? I am going to just trash it now.
And I put that there because I meant to donate it. We're going to go cart it out to the car. So you are actually doing a super macro type of sort. You're not overthinking the minutiae of it. You are just getting it into piles. And then you go stash each of those piles in the, you know, accompanying area where they should have been in the first place. It's not perfect.
It's a step above the dig and dump because at least you put yourself one step in the right direction because you made some sense of those piles before you moved them. So super useful. You can do that if you have a little extra time that you didn't have in the dig and dump process. So option three, option three, I'm calling the slow roll. This is the, if you could do it, and I'm using air quotes here, right?
First time, you would actually take the time to do it because when are you ever going to do it again? Or the time's going to pass anyway? Or I am sick of stuff shifting all the time and never feeling like I'm gaining ground and it ends here. Like if you've just gotten to that mentality, this would work really well if the people you're having over are just sort of used to the state of your house anyway. These are your closest friends or your closest loved ones.
And they would actually celebrate with you that even though it looks only slightly different, that you did make progress and you made progress the quote unquote right way.
So consider if that is your existence and that is your lifestyle and you're like you know what this this actually feels good or I wasn't brave enough to host anybody this year but I would like to maybe at the next go-round so why don't I pretend that I'm hosting them and I start getting to where I can see the table and I'm going to actually do it the slow roll way which is to you're still going to sort things. You might even just pick up each item and make a decision on it immediately.
I want to throw this away and you walk it straight to the trash can. I want to donate this and you walk it straight to your car. This is a hairbrush that I don't even know why it's on the dining room table. It belongs in the bathroom. I'm going to walk and go put it in the drawer in the bathroom. So you are immediately assigning each item that you have in your hand it's actual
home and you're taking it there right then. This is a very Dana K. White style of, you know, let's handle it once and for all. All right. Now, keep in mind, you don't have to just do each of these three. You can combine them. And by combining them, what I mean is you can assess, okay, how much time do I really have? I'm not so desperate that I have to do the dig and dump, But it is Monday.
Everybody is coming on Thursday. So I really have today, tomorrow, and maybe a little bit of Wednesday before I have to start focusing on food. So I'm going to give myself today to sort and start putting things away the right way. But then when tomorrow hits, I'm going to start digging and dumping then. You can create hybrid versions of these options. So keep that in mind.
Then here's a little bonus tip just to keep in mind as well if the, You are not going to have people enter your home, sit down at the table, never move and then leave it because likely you're going to need a bathroom that's going to have to be clean. You're going to need an entryway that looks remotely inviting. They might walk in or out of your kitchen, especially if you have an open concept.
So you need to make sure that is a little bit spiffed up and you're going to maybe have to spiff up a living room. So in this case, my bonus tip is called doing a circuit clean. This works really well if your house wasn't so horrendous that you need to just dig into all of these locations.
So what I talk about with a circuit clean is decide, okay, I am going to designate 20 minutes to each location because otherwise I'm going to get in the dining room and I'm going to deep dive in the dining room and I'm going to look up three hours from now and then dining room is going to look amazing and yet every other room is going to be blown up and I can't afford for that to happen. I just need every room to look a little better than it does right now.
So set yourself a 20 minute timer and go, every space will look 20 minutes better than it did before I started. And you go 20 minutes in a powder room and it's, I mean, 20 minutes of powder room, it should be scrubbed clean. You don't have to revisit that space. 20 minutes to spiffy up a living room, 20 minutes to spiffy up an entrance, 20 minutes to spiffy up a dining room, and you go done. Oh, kitchen. I forgot the kitchen.
Or you do the circuit once and things are looking better, but you're like, I'd really like it a little bit better than this. And hey, I actually have a little more time. Let me set the timers again and do the circuit again. You can keep repeating the circuit once a day, twice a day until the guests actually arrive. And each time you're seeing a new layer of a little bit better and a new layer of a little bit better until you realize, hey, everything looks sort of equally
improved and that's a really good one when you have to consider multiple spaces. So, I am keeping this one short so that you can dig in and get ready, but see if any of those work. Give me a shout out. Give me some feedback. I love it when I hear from you all.
If you want to work on this today and you're interested in experiencing a live with me, which is something I do in my membership group all the time, I am going to actually go live in my free group tomorrow from my dining room as we talk about what do we need to consider? Can we do it actually on a Tuesday and feel really prepared for a Thursday.
So if you want to do your focus in your dining room today so that you can do the live with me tomorrow and really work on your dining room, that could be fun. But I am going live in my group tomorrow at 1 p.m. Eastern. And yeah, if you would like to follow along with that, I'd love to have your company to get to my free group. I'll put a link in the show notes, but you literally go into your browser window
and type B-I-T dot L-Y slash joylovinghomecommunity. So bit.ly slash joylovinghomecommunity. And you can get into my free podcast group. And yeah, join me over there. If you have been dabbling with the idea of joining my membership group and want to gift this to yourself or ask for it from somebody for Christmas, it is currently open. I'm going to leave it open till the end of the year. I don't do sales because it's only $10 a month and it's just, it opens and closes. So it's, it's open.
Give yourself the gift of, hey, you know, I'd love to be part of this group. It's $10 a month. Can you, you know, decide that's my Christmas gift and ask for it from somebody? I would love to have you join. But to do that, you just go to joylovinghome.com slash membership and you can join us there. All right. I hope you have the loveliest holiday. I am planning to drop one more podcast on Wednesday. So if you want to listen to that while you're working on last minute things, that would be great.
And then I will be hitting the ground rolling in December. For the last couple of years, I've done a 12 days of Christmas where I do a podcast every day for 12 days just to prep us for Christmas. So you can be on the lookout for that. And if you are not subscribed to the podcast, please do so that you don't miss any of those downloads. All right, guys. Yeah. Continue to choose joy.