Patterns are everywhere in nature. The spiral pattern is one of the most common, showing up in everything from ferns to fingerprints, seashells to spiral galaxies. Your home is your “safehouse” and any good Agent should have a clean and respectable dwelling when socializing. This is a personal struggle for me, due to several factors but one of them is my often scatterbrained state of mind. So many items come up in a day, write this article, do the laundry, make sure the shipment of gear is coming in for my side business Survivalist Box. Junk mail can turn into paper monsters, dishes can pile up for days and dust and clutter can consume the home. In fact for me, it’s gotten pretty bad, paper monsters have collected, craft projects are in various stages of completion in boxes, my personal survival gear isn’t as organized as I would like it to be, etc. Generally I’m finding a state of clutter abounds and its something I do not like. Essentially its a breakdown of integrity in my commitment to keeping my safehouse socially presentable. Notice I did not say completely clean and orderly, because that’s an unattainable goal for me given my time constraints.
Clutter is the physical evidence of the inability to make decisions.
So a solution I’m trying and have found to be effective is to clean in a spiral pattern, starting with the most critical and physically centered tasks first, and working outwards. For me its things like dishes, keeping the kitchen island clean, kitchen counters, livingroom table, edge areas, vacuuming etc. You can order this as a list as well following them straight down, or you can just follow the curvature of your home. That way the most visited areas of the home are the cleanest the most often and the edge areas get hit when you have time. It does take a commitment to keeping up with it though because those paper monsters reproduce like gremlins. The key point to the spiral pattern is every major cleaning session you restart from the center outwards. It will keep those areas clean and you can spiral out quickly and easily that way and hit more and more areas of the home. There’s a time and a place for stacking time too, meaning have one thing going while you do other things. Let the washer run while you sweep, let the dishes and toilet soak while you tidy up etc. Following this pattern can help a scattered mind keep up with the clutter and the chores better than anything I’ve found yet.
What tips do you have for keeping your home/safehouse clean and presentable?