Transcription
Your house gets messy because of the broken window effect. Check this out.
Your house isn't messy because you're overwhelmed or you're lazy. Your house is messy because you're living in the broken window effect and you don't even know it.
There's this famous theory in sociology that if a building has one broken window that doesn't get repaired, then the rest of the windows will eventually be smashed. Why? Because that one un-repaired window sends a subconscious signal to the world that no one is in charge here.
Your kitchen counter is your broken window. That pile of mail, that's your broken window. When you leave today's dishes in the sink or the laundry on the couch to fold, you are sending a signal to your own brain and to your family that the standard has dropped.
Once that happens, your brain does what it's designed to do. It adapts. It now says, "Oh, okay, that's what we're allowing." And then the messy bedroom doesn't feel as urgent. The cluttered closets feel normal. The chaos spreads. Not because you don't care or because you're lazy, but because your brain thinks that that is the new baseline. So, you don't even realize it's happening.
This is why my daily six works and why that I tell you if you only focus on those six tasks, your whole house will improve. And when I say that, people love to tell me, "If I only do six things, my house will still be messy." But, that's because they think cleaning is about doing everything. It's not. It's not about deep cleaning. It's just about boarding up the windows.
You see, when you reset the sink, clear the counters every night, you are reclaiming the authority of your house. Once those main windows are fixed, the rest will start to happen automatically. You'll start to put things away without forcing yourself to. You'll notice the mess sooner. You care again. Not because you're trying harder or because you somehow found motivation, but because the standard has been restored. Most of this happens subconsciously. You don't even realize you're doing it. You were never lazy. That was never the problem. That is never the problem. I always tell you, it's never that you're lazy. You just need to re-establish the standard.
So, stop trying to clean the whole house at once. Stop waiting for motivation. Stop thinking you need like a six-hour reset to catch up. Just fix your broken window. Tonight, what is one spot in your house that when it's messy, it makes the entire house feel like a failure? Start there. I'm curious. Is there one area in your home where the clutter seems to accumulate more quickly? I need my wife for this question.
>> [laughter] >> Yeah. What would she say? I don't know. Would she say it's your clutter? No. Okay. Um She would say >> She No. [clears throat] Uh for sure no. What I don't I Well, actually, I should never take that off the table. There's always possibility. Uh I just think it's the space. Uh I just think it's the space and it's it's somebody's always giving us something. Mhm. Mhm. And And sometimes things have a way of coming into the home faster than your ability to respond. Yep. Or or say no. You know what I mean? Gifts, cards, things that people send to you and it's like, "Who sent this to me and thought it was a good idea?" Mhm. You know. Yeah. Um And I I I would I would I would say probably the kitchen because when things come in and we got to sort it out. I mean, the kitchen and the living room are basically just about the same thing. So, it's usually like there on a counter until we figure out what to do with it or we have to like hide it somewhere so we're not bumping into it until we figure out what to do with it. So, yeah, we we we we have a a clutter issue to resolve probably on a weekly basis every time something comes into the home.
Right, because [snorts] you have a smaller home. You live in a 400 square foot apartment with your wife and it's easier for things to accumulate in a space like that because it's harder to hide them. But, also because it's harder to hide them, you often have to deal with them more quickly. You can't just make them out of sight, out of mind. You can't throw them in a cabinet or a basement or an attic. You don't have access to any of that.
>> Yeah. And so, you would have to get an extra external storage space, and you'd have to drive there to bring your clutter to this clutter mausoleum that we call a storage locker. And my place that accumulates the most clutter regularly are the countertops. That's why I came with the no piles rule because I'm not immune to it either. It's really simple to have a stack of mail. Oh, yeah, I forgot I'm going to check the mail once this week, and now you've got this whole mailbox full of mostly junk mail. And if I don't want to deal with it right then, I could just set it on the counter. Every flat surface becomes a magnet for these types of things. Oh, I've got a receipt in my pocket. I'll just put it there. And then of course, my keys are there, and then I'll put my chapstick there. And oh, there's this thing that I needed to help Ella with. Okay. Oh yeah, and there's a contract I needed to review. I'll put that in the pile. And so, the no piles rule, and I do this with my family all the time. I have It's very important to do it non-judgmentally. I wrote about the no piles rule by the way in Very, Very Simple. It's the audiobook that TK and I did. You can download it on Audible, or you can get it for free over at veryvery simple.com. Uh but anyway, um uh the no piles rule basically, I'll go through my family and non-judgmentally I'll say, "All right. Hey, what what can you tell me about this pile?" Cuz the word pile by itself is true. It's not judgmental. It could be. Like, "Oh, another pile." Like, it's just the energy you put behind it, right? But say, "Hey, what can you tell me about this pile?" And then Doc's like, "Well, most of that's yours. Here's the Do you have to deal with this? You have to deal with this? You have to deal with this?" I say, "Oh yeah. Thank you." And then I find a home for each item because I know their home is better in the file cabinet or in the shredder or the recycling. It's not on the counter. It's not meant to be there. It's a purgatory for my stuff. It actually shout out to Audrey. She's the lady who made this video here. So good.
>> And she does this um daily six cleaning habits. And so there's she has this one pager right here. We'll put a link to this in the show notes if you want to check it out. And she calls it the daily six. She'll She also has the weekly 10 and then monthly and quarterly things to do. And she calls it the 6/10 list, the cleaning schedule for busy household. Well, I don't have a busy household, but I think this is useful for me as well. Every day she does these six things. Make the bed. Wash the dishes. Scrub the sink. Wipe counters. Vacuum floors. One load of laundry. She does each of these every single day. And then she has a weekly 10 like wiping out the fridge, wiping out the microwave, tidying the pantry, etc. etc. And then monthly, scrub the showers, deep clean appliances, clean out the garage, vacuum out vehicles. And by the way, these are adjustable. You may say, "I'm not going to do that monthly. I'm going to do that every other month." So bi-monthly. Or uh quarterly, wipe the baseboards and doors. I prefer to wipe the baseboards monthly. I don't want to wait till quarterly. So these are adjustable, right? Clean fans and lights, clean windows, clean furniture, change the air filter, wipe down cabinets. We change our air filter every six months generally out in Ohio, but here in LA you might change it every month, who knows. Uh kind of depends on on how dirty the air filter is.
What is it though about having a small list like this TK that helps keep us accountable with these daily tasks so they don't grow out of control. It gives you structure. One of the hardest parts about doing the things that we need to do to maintain order is just getting started. And if you can answer a lot of hard questions ahead of time, then that can make it easy for you to take that first step. And so, when you got a list like this, it reminds me of back in the day when we used to have video rentals, you know, Blockbuster videos and all that. I'm sure you probably relate to the experience of going there being like, "What should we get? What are we in the mood for?" And you spend about as much time looking for a movie as it would take to watch a movie.
>> That's right. So, what do you do? In the course of living life, some movie trailer comes on the TV and that looks good to you, you write it down. Or someone talks about a movie, "You ever seen this? Oh, yeah, I got to see that." You write it down and you keep it on the fridge, right? So, that whenever you're in the mood to go out and watch a movie, it's easy for you because you take your little list and you go to the store and you rent the movie. It's the same way with organizing your home, maintaining order. You look at your little list and you say, "Oh, this isn't so bad. I just got to take one of these things and get started." And when you do that, you build a momentum and you probably want to do three or four more things.
Yeah, and once you start doing it, you realize it's not as big as I built it up in my head. There's one small mess in my home, but it ends up ruining the entire home if I don't deal with it now. And [snorts] that is, I think, the essence of the the broken window effect. If you have one broken window, the time to repair it is now. You don't wait till someone's coming through and breaking out all of the windows. Do you have any other insights on the the broken window effect?
>> I absolutely love the analogy. I love everything about the video. And although this does seem to be very home-centered, very minimalist-friendly in the messaging, this applies to so much that every form of disorder in your life has a single broken window, which if you can fix, will make it so much easier to pull all of the other things into the gravitational force of that order. This is like the the cluttered window effect >> Yeah. for your home, but everything else if I deal with the small things now, I'm not going to deal with it as this giant thing later on. It's the reason that we go get medical screenings for certain diseases and and illness. I want to deal with it now before it's taking over my whole body or I want to deal with the clutter right now before it's taking over my entire home. I hope you enjoyed that highlight from the minimalist private podcast.
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