That definitely didn’t go as planned!

One of the rules I set for myself when starting this blog was “no medical talk,” so I won’t go into detail. Suffice to say, the last several months have been a -5,000/10 experience that I don’t recommend to anyone. My priorities were wrapped up in survival, and there just hasn’t been much in the way of “free time” to write. It’s going to be a long time before anything approaches “normal” again, but I am finally making baby steps toward getting the rest of my life back. Reclaiming a hobby seems like a natural progression.

I’ve had a lot of opportunity to reflect on the concept of sustainability these last months. At the core, it goes way beyond the quality or type of cleaning products a person uses. Instead, I found myself asking much more basic questions. What exactly does a reasonable home maintenance routine look like? Which tasks can be streamlined to minimize the amount of energy required on a given day? How the heck is someone supposed to balance a shoestring budget, low energy, and a healthy meal planning routine? My old approach required a complete re-evaluation. So, step-by-step, that’s what I’m doing!

To give myself a starting point, I purchased the ADHD cleaning binder bundle from thesouthernspruce on Etsy. She uses Canva templates to allow for customization, and I love the way she breaks things down by day/week/season and has additional cheat sheets if you have a block of time to kill (or X amount of time until company arrives) and would like some quick suggestions. After printing and laminating the daily/weekly/quarterly/annual chore chart, I used some old magnet strips I had lying around to post it on my fridge. The color makes it harder for my brain to tune out the information, and assigning a room to each day of the week (along with the bare necessities) makes it easy to stay on top of maintenance. If I am unable to complete a task on a given day, I do it the next day. A+ for universal design!

Another set of organization tools I found helpful were this large-format magnet calendar set. This was a “I don’t have energy to hunt through stores but holy crap I desperately need help” Amazon find, and it’s proven extremely useful. I got them on sale for $17.95, and put them up on my refrigerator. This way, I benefit from the ritual of handwriting plans and it becomes physically impossible to miss which important events are coming up! The goal-setting and habit trackers are another nice touch. When your entire life becomes wrapped up in making it to the next deadline, it’s easy to forget to follow through on celebrating little wins.

My final touchstone for personal organization is this daily Task Hub journal. Purchased with the magnet calendars for $9.99, I feel that this journal’s format significantly reduces my mental load with planning and executing each day’s priorities. The only fixed items are appointments, everything else is sorted into categories by type of action. There’s still a section where I can highlight top priorities, but the rest is basically a menu I can select from throughout the day. Only have ten minutes between events? Maybe I can take care of that text before a water break. Three hours of free time after an appointment? Time to knock out the rest of the menu! There’s minimal thinking involved, mostly doing. At the end of the day, celebrating the wins and setting up the next day’s page is a nice way to wind down.

So, to sum up: step one of sustainability (for me) is getting myself organized. Next time, I’ll share a little about changes I made in my actual home to move things along!