How to work - and relax - in a mess

Life does not begin after you put your house in order

I don’t need a spotless home to work — or relax. I love a clean space as much as the next person, but I value my time far more. With five kids, there’s a lot going on in my life. If I’ve got two focused hours to do something, or two open hours on the weekend to read, I’m not going to spend the first 45 minutes cleaning. Plus, I know my housemates will just mess everything up again. And I’ll never get that time back.

However, I’ve been studying time and productivity for long enough to know that some people have a much lower tolerance for mess. I believe some of this is cultural conditioning. Many women have been taught that if their homes are messy, they are total failures, so there’s no point even thinking about doing anything else until the mess on the floor is gone. That might be the patriarchy talking, but some of this cultural conditioning isn’t as nefarious. I like a lot of what decluttering expert Marie Kondo writes and teaches about, but I cringe every time I read various versions of the phrase “Your real life begins after putting your house in order.” No it doesn’t! Life is not dependent on your house being perfectly tidy. You can enjoy life no matter what state your house happens to be in.

Learn to live with a mess

So if you are looking for permission to let things be a little messy, here it is. But if you really, truly, have trouble focusing or relaxing in a mess, then you might just need to acknowledge that about your personality. And then you need to figure out a way to deal with it.

If you work from home, one option is to do your best to create a workspace that can be shut off from the rest of your house. Even if this is a very small room, or a converted closet, figure out a way that you can shut the door and not see anything else. Then, if your office is pristine, you can consider that your environment. You might even want to put a little fridge in your office with some snacks and water, and create a pristine pathway to the nearest restroom. That way you do not have to encounter any chaos that might make you think it’s time to put away the laundry, do the dishes, and pick up the toys when you are supposed to be working. Really, this amounts of cleaning one room, shutting the door, and sitting in there.

Another option is to leave. Someone recently told me that after her husband took the kids to daycare at 7:30 a.m. on his way to work, she often didn’t have virtual meetings until 9. She tended to use those 90 minutes to clean up, but realized they might be more profitably invested in advancing her career. Someone else suggested she leave at the same time as the daycare crew and go to a coffee shop. She might work on her top priority non-meeting task for the day from 7:30-9 a.m., and then be able to relax during the day’s meetings, knowing she’d already gotten it done. Yes, there would still be clutter, but if she felt she had to deal with it, she could do that during small breaks in the afternoon. Most people have less energy and focus after lunch. So the opportunity cost wouldn’t be so great.

If that’s not feasible, another option is to set an absolute limit on cleaning time. In the scenario I just talked about, this person might decide to clean for 30 minutes, and then have an 8 a.m. check-in with a work buddy. They could set their goals for the day and hold each other accountable for working on them until their 9 a.m. meetings. No, not everything would get cleaned but likely the most visible stuff would, and this would prevent the cleaning from stretching to fill the available space.

It’s OK to relax

You can employ some of these same strategies to relax on weekends even if the house is a bit messy too. You can keep one room tidy — maybe your primary bedroom — and relax and read in there. You can leave, and go hang out in a park or library or coffee shop if you’ve got some downtime, so you won’t see any messes. And you can set a limit on cleaning. You get a certain amount of time (hopefully with other family members’ help!) and anything that doesn’t happen before the buzzer goes off can wait until the next designated cleaning time.

Of course you can also get professional help with cleaning. The problem is that hiring a cleaning service that comes every Thursday to clean your house won’t help with the small messes that occur in between then. The mess on the kitchen counter on Tuesday morning is an entirely separate issue. But it might be possible to outsource some of this too. Some people decide to hire a housekeeper who comes in a few times a week for fewer hours in lieu of a cleaning service. Or if you have an after school sitter, that person might be willing to come in an hour before the kids get there to tidy up. It might be worth exploring.

In any case, there is nothing wrong with wanting a neat home. The problem is if that desire keeps you from getting your work done, or advancing in your career because you keep hopping up to put things away when you should be focusing, and if you never get to relax. Especially if you live with other people, things will never be 100 percent neat. So, better to figure out how to limit the time devoted to it, or how to limit your exposure to it instead.