Make yourself a haven

One way to actually relax

I speak about time management frequently. Inevitably, one of the biggest laugh lines in my speeches is when I tell people they can save time by lowering their housekeeping standards. Depending on the audience, I sometimes riff that people tell me they can’t relax if their home is a mess. OK, clean one room, shut the door, and sit in there!

I say it as a joke, but I think there is real merit to this idea. Lots of people find it hard to relax when they see undone work, whether that’s the number of unread messages rising in an email app, or a pile of dishes, or something that is clearly in the wrong place. The instinct is to go deal with the problem, so that you can relax, but you can see how this plays out. It takes a long time to clean a whole house or put everything away, or for that matter, to get to inbox zero. If that is the necessary first step before you can relax, this raises the very real possibility that you will never relax.

And that doesn’t sound good.

Choose one spot

But if you know this is a problem for you, at least on the home front, there is one way to get around the constant-tidying compulsion: choose one room that is relatively easy to keep clean, and then consciously treat this as your closed door haven.

Primary bedrooms are often good for this. Even if the adults who occupy them aren’t naturally neat, they’re also busy. They’re probably not starting Lego projects and art projects and what not and keeping them all over the floor. You might make a quick sweep for laundry, make the bed, and shove any toys out into another room. Then shut the door.

If that doesn’t work, if you happen to have a house that’s big enough for a formal living room, sometimes those get less use, and hence attract fewer active projects/toys/dishes/laundry/etc. This room could also become your haven. An enclosed porch could serve this function as long as you store the outdoor gear somewhere else.

What you don’t see

In a pinch, even a small apartment could offer some spot where you can’t see the clutter or the work. Turn a chair to a window, and make the space in front of it minimal and relatively clear. Then commit to not turning your head!

We can waste all kinds of time puttering around the house, picking up things here and there without any purpose except a vague pursuit of order. I tell people to stop doing that, but I know that’s harder for some folks than others. If that sounds like you, creating a little haven can be a real strategy for putting some actual rest into your life. And that is well worth doing.