If You’re Drowning in Chaos, This Book Is For You

As I wrote about in my last post, I’ve been going through a pretty chaotic season of life. In the midst of it all, I listened to the book, How To Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis, and I found it to be revolutionary. If you consider yourself drowning in anything, whether good or bad, but you want make small changes to maintain your house, I highly recommend this book.

“But, Maggie, I don’t have time to read, because, as you said, I’m drowning!” – you right now.

Guys, AUDIOBOOKS. You gotta start LISTENING to books. It might change your life. Try Audible, or try Libby paired with your local library.

But also, this book is different. It’s short with short chapters. KC (the author) literally wrote the book directly from her short-form videos on social media because she didn’t have time to expand upon them. But isn’t that beautiful?! There’s no fluff. From one drowning person to another.

My main takeaway from the book is that cleaning is a kindness to your future self, not an issue of morality. In other words, being dirty or messy doesn’t make you a bad person. And on the other hand, being clean, tidy, or organized doesn’t make you a good person. Rather, cleaning is a functional tool we use to help ourselves and our families thrive. For some people that might not mean much, but for others, this gentle approach to cleaning might be wonderfully therapeutic and possibly even motivational!

KC also offers many, many practical tips on how to keep up with your house, especially in small chunks. She focuses far more on function than the traditional advice you’ve likely seen. A few of my favorite takeaways include:

• All items in your house fall into one of these categories: trash, dishes, laundry, things with a place, things without a place. Attack tidying by doing one category at a time.
• Your brain isn’t motivated if it doesn’t see progress, so set small goals.
• Not everything has to be clean at the same time. You can rotate the areas of your house where you focus your cleaning energy.
• Some laundry just doesn’t need to be folded (ex. underwear, bathing suits, baby clothes). Create systems to embrace that.
• It’s okay to drop the low-priority things (ex. recycling and donating old clothes instead of just throwing them away) when you only have time for high-priority stuff.

I confidently gave the book the coveted 5-star rating on Goodreads; no doubt about it.

If this sounds like something that would serve you, give the book a read (or listen). I bet you won’t regret it!