You may also believe that once you manage to declutter your entire home and organize it well, so‑called lasting order will finally reign. The household will then practically maintain itself. Today, I’d like to shed some light on this myth. We’ll talk about the vicious cycle of chaos and exhaustion, why lasting order is more of an ideal than everyday reality, and I’ll share my tips on how to approach your home in a healthy way.
Big promises we know from books
Many books about lightening the home have that promise right in the title. Karen Kingston teaches us how to get rid of clutter once and for all. Marie Kondo promises a miraculous tidy‑up forever. Hideko Yamashita writes about perfect cleaning that will set us free.
These are big promises. They’re meant to motivate us, and I understand why. But I admit that in my practice, I see something different. I see women who are very tired of their homes. Their homes are full of things, many of them have read these books long ago, and the perfect tidy‑up or lasting order unfortunately never happened.
A household is not something fixed
Our households simply aren’t fixed. Even after we declutter and organize them well, we cannot bring them into some permanent state. We live with partners, children, pets. We buy groceries, we cook, we simply live there. The household is constantly pulsing. New things flow in and others flow out.
And that’s the key. We need to establish balance. If balance is missing and new things keep entering the home without us letting anything go, we have the first condition for clutter to start forming on its own.
The vicious cycle of chaos and exhaustion
This cycle starts very quietly and runs for years in many households.
The first condition is that we have too many things. Once we have too many, we cannot have a good storage system because we simply have nowhere to put them. Because of that, organization doesn’t work either. When we can’t return things to their place, poor habits begin to pile up. Along with them comes the fact that we often can’t find things, so we buy new ones. Unhealthy consumer habits enter the picture and the cycle keeps spinning.
I always picture this state as a tangled ball of yarn. The more you pull, the tighter the knot becomes.
The way out begins with letting go
The absolute foundation is to start letting things go. We’ve talked about this many times, but repetition is the mother of wisdom. Once we let things go, we free up storage space and improve organization. As a result, less clutter begins to form automatically. And if we also manage not to constantly buy new things, we can step out of that tangled ball. It becomes much easier to breathe in our home.
But it doesn’t end there. We need to master two more skills.
Returning things to their place and finishing tasks
The first is returning things to their place. It’s a basic skill, and ideally we should teach it to other household members as well.
The second skill is being able to finish things. What we start, we finish. My tip is to choose smaller decluttering sessions and smaller cleaning tasks and even give yourself time limits. I personally often use my smartwatch to set a timer. I usually work in intervals from five to fifteen minutes. When I’m about to clean the kitchen, I tell myself I’ll give it a maximum of fifteen minutes. I set the timer, sometimes play music, and dedicate that moment only to the kitchen. Once I finish, I’m done — and it feels great.
The timer nicely frames our time. When we give ourselves small tasks and finish them, dopamine is released and we feel good because something is behind us. At the same time, we avoid rotating from one activity to another.
Especially in households with lots of things and lots of clutter, we women tend to rotate. Wherever we look, a task is waiting. We leave the kitchen for the bathroom and in the bathroom we realize we wanted to start a load of laundry. The kitchen remains unfinished. Such a day can end with us being overwhelmed, having finished nothing, and even though we did many things, we feel frustrated. We feel like life is slipping through our fingers and we’re not managing. All of this can be greatly reduced when we break work into smaller tasks and bring them to completion.
Where lasting order actually works
People who have a large number of things often fixate on the idea of an ideal method. So let’s hypothetically say where lasting order could actually work.
I’d say it could work for someone who lives alone in a small apartment and has high standards for order. They enjoy it, they pamper their space, and they connect it with their identity. Such a person can truly maintain order almost forever.
In a household with small children, pets, and a partner, so much dynamics, relationships, and negotiation about who takes care of what enters the picture that the idea of an unchanging home is really an illusion. I’m reminded of the book *The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning* by Swedish author Margareta Magnusson. She reminds us that we won’t take clutter to the grave anyway. That’s why it’s good to learn to detach from things and let them go.
Let’s set the bar lower
For me, it’s much better to set the bar lower and let go of the illusion that once we lighten our belongings, order will maintain itself.
Consumer habits play a big role. Only when we stop buying unnecessary new things can we make a real leap. And it usually goes hand in hand. When people invest a lot of energy into getting rid of their things, they often change their shopping habits too. They simply stop enjoying it.
When lightening the home, it’s essential to stay in touch with yourself the whole time. To create a home that matches my style and my values. Not to orient myself according to trends, whatever they may be. To work with the vision of my ideal home and gradually create it in my own image. Then it won’t happen that we crave new things just because they’re currently in fashion. In many households, the reality is that people keep buying things they don’t need at all, and the home becomes overwhelmed.
So as you can see, for anything even slightly resembling the promise of miraculous lasting order to happen, it’s a series of small steps, healthy habits, and changes in thinking and shopping. It’s not something that happens quickly, like the miraculous before‑and‑after transformations we see on social media.
Would you rather listen to the article? I’ve also recorded this topic as a video.
Why I’m talking about this
I’m talking about this from personal experience, because I myself believed in these ideals. With small children, I tried to practice cleaning methods almost to the extreme, and because of that, I burned out. Based on this experience, the book *Healing Clean‑Up* was created, where an entire chapter is dedicated to maintenance and how to keep order.
What’s a bit dangerous about clutter versus order is that there’s actually no clear definition of what the “right” order is. And the freedom lies in the fact that we can choose it ourselves. We can decide what kind of home and what level of order feels good to live in.
That’s exactly why I created the Healing Clean‑Up AI Guide for you. We trained and built it for several months so that it accompanies you individually, with respect to your current life energy and where you are right now. It’s not a generic tool. It helps you create your own cleaning plan, because someone living alone in a small apartment needs something different than a mother of three who is very tired from household care. You get ten questions for free, so you can try it out calmly.
I’m curious about your opinion. Do you think lasting order is possible? Are you able to maintain yours at home? I’ll be happy if you share your experience with me in the comments.
