The trouble is that when cleaning, I evidently have an unhealthy amount of attention deficit... I would start by wanting to clean up one small area of a room... totally do-able and not at all over-whelming, right?  However, in the process I would need to take one thing to another room.  But when I got there, this and that needed cleaning just to put item #1 away, so I would start cleaning there until something else took me to another room... until the entire house was torn to heck and I was left feeling so overwhelmed that I would give up half-way through and everything was worse than when I started.  Or if I managed to keep at it, everything would be a complete disaster for days and sometimes weeks of cleaning and then finally... poof!  The whole house was clean.  And stayed that way for a whole five minutes.

The whole process meant that I got everything clean, but the very thought of cleaning one area was so daunting that I would start to hyperventilate at the mere thought of what it would snow-ball into.  And the distress of knowing that it would again be a complete mess after all that epic work would make my stomach more than a little queasy.  Ridiculous, I know, but there it is.  Maybe the first case ever documented of house-cleaning-phobia.

Finally, my first cleaning epiphany came when my bad hip gave out on me after the twentieth time I stepped over a pile of stuff in the hall and had to careen into a pile of laundry to break my fall.  Laying there gasping like a fish out of water, I realized that I spent more time traveling from room to room than cleaning.  No wonder cleaning one little area ended up being so exhausting!

This was a hard habit to break, but I started by just dumping everything that didn't belong out the door to the room I was cleaning in, and then when I was done with the room, taking all the stuff and putting it away with the rule that I didn't linger as I did it.  And an improvement over that would be to put it all into a box or basket so that it could be carried away easier in the end.  Something so simple, yet such a dramatic change in the process.  It turned cleaning an area into cleaning that area instead of the entire house.

The second thing I realized was that cleaning an area to perfection was another huge reason I ended up so over-whelmed that I didn't even want to start.  Giving up on the idea that I was going to "clean the house", or even "clean a room", released a lot of the pressure constricting my chest.  Instead, I had to accept that more often than not, the best I was going to do was "make some progress".  So I changed my approach and started with the idea in my head that all I had to do was spend 5 to 10 minutes to make a little progress on an area.  Then stop.  

The surprising thing was how much improvement that concentrated little bit of time would make on an area as long as I didn't spend most of it traveling to put away other things and getting distracted by other messes.  Of course, without direction, I found that I often cleaned up one or two areas and the rest of the house continued to become more and more of a mess.

So my new-years resolution for the last two years has been simply to succeed in check-marking this list on my refrigerator every day (or more accurately... filling in the little bubbles like a test sheet... because that is much more uniformly neat and organized... Wow!  I am really sounding more OCD than normal today). 

I have the house separated by days... and grouped by the type of cleaning or cleaning equipment it needs to get done.

Monday is bathrooms and watering plants / fish tanks.

Tuesday is the office and spare bedroom.

Wednesday is the hallway, utility room, and cat litter box.

Thursday is the living-room, loft, and master bedroom.

Friday is the kitchen and dining-room.

Saturday is outdoor or car projects and home improvement.

Sunday is home improvement projects and cat litter box.

The X means exercise.  I added that this year.  5 minutes or more of exercise... easy to say, but often not easy to make myself do.

I don't always succeed, and I admit that it makes me feel completely ridiculous that I have not been able to make myself do the exercise portion on four days of the last week.  However, even though it makes me feel like a kid with a list of chores to do, it also makes me feel good when I see that list fill up with check-marks (little neat bubbles) week after week.  And the house is looking better and cleaner than ever before... Not perfect mind-you, but better.

The hardest part is still doing a little work on the list item if I have been working my butt off all day on another project.  But something I have discovered... like any good habit, it is much harder to keep up if I skip even a couple days.