How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House's Dirty Little Secrets

Dana K. White helps you get organized, even if you are not the organized type. Written in easy to follow manner, without assuming you are an organizer. Has a good sense of humour along with the info.

I received an Advance Reader Copy in exchange for my honest review.Funny, but not too cutesy, realistic without being harsh, "How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind..." is a refreshing look at reclaiming the home you dreamed you could have. I am just getting started, but I have HOPE, and know that if I stick to this and don't quit, I will make progress and make the changes that I need to make.With a delightful sense of honesty and humor, Dana K. White shares her "Slob story", and shows the world that we are not alone in our mess and struggle. What a feeling to realize that there are others out there like me - who want a beautiful home, but are overwhelmed with things that we are attached to and don't know how to let go of. Learning about "Slob Vision" and "Time Passage Awareness Disorder" help us recognize problem areas, and give guidelines and strategies to counter these.Dana's concepts of "Dishes math" and "Laundry math" teach that routinely doing necessary tasks will keep them from becoming overwhelming if you stick with them. When faced with a cluttered mess of a room, start with the easy stuff first, and work from there.Dana teaches decluttering strategies, while sharing her own experience over the past 7 years, as she has transformed her home into an almost always company ready state. She is also brutally honest (is that too harsh?), ok, she is very frank, about the fact that there is NO END TO THIS. People like us (we know who we are) will always struggle with housework, clutter, and distraction, and Dana gives us HOPE.She teaches how to start decluttering, and gives encouragement to keep going. She shares a technique that allows you to start decluttering, with the knowledge that if you get stopped in the midst, you won't have an even larger mess on your hands. She shares struggles and successes, and give practical tips on the main aspects of homemaking.I highly recommend this book to anyone who feels overwhelmed with stuff, and who doesn't know where to start. Start here - do the easy stuff and read this book!

Well-written with humour and lots of great pointers that make sense

I've read a few home management book but this one really clicked with me. It goes right back to basics and both gives some really clear steps of what should help, but also leaves it open for you to make it your own plan. I did also find The Organised Mum Method helpful but this assumes that even that type of plan is too much to start with. It's a good read too, quite a bit of humour and doesn't take itself too seriously.It's probably not for you if you're looking for a way to keep your home immaculate, but if you've no idea where to even start then this is perfect.

Dana White runs a blog and podcast for people who struggle with housekeeping (like me!). I've been reading A Slob Comes Clean for about a year now, and it's the chronicle of Dana's own struggles and hard-earned lessons on how to really, actually keep your house reasonably clean. She calls it Reality-Based Cleaning.Now, if you are a person who doesn't have too hard a time with this stuff, this book is not for you. It's written for those of us with Slob Vision -- the inability to really see a mess or a pile until it smacks us in the face. It's for those of us capable of being completely surprised to find a sink overflowing with dirty dishes when we didn't do the dishes the night before.Dana understands, and has figured out a few ways to cope, which she now shares, including: the few basic habits that really will make a big difference if you make sure to do them every day letting go of project-based or perfectionist thinking pre-made decisions! developing days for jobs the truly revolutionary realization about containers (this is a big one for me!) the two decluttering questions, which are pretty genius honestlyI've been working on these habits myself, and I am actually seeing real improvement in my life. So I'm here to tell you that Dana has been the most helpful to me of any cleaning/organization writer I've read--and I have read a lot of them. I am much, much better at reading about housekeeping than I am at actually doing it; heck, I enjoy reading housekeeping books regardless of their applicability to my life! But this has been the most applicable and encouraging book so far.This is not to say that my life is just like hers, or that every single thing matches up. Laundry may be the only thing that I am really pretty good at, while Dana considers it one of her biggest challenges. But the key is to adapt and tweak things to our own lives.Dana is also a talented writer with a great sense of fun. The book is just a kick to read. ...the five­ minute pickup is the perfect habit to turn into a family task. But, again, don’t judge this family habit on the first day. The first day won’t be pretty. I don’t recommend making your first day their first day. Let them see you setting the timer and working for five minutes. Be the example of how this works, the proof that we’re really only talking about five minutes and not the frantic whole­-house­-clean­-up­-before­-Grandma­-arrives that they’re used to. But even if they’ve seen (and actually noticed) you doing daily five­ minute pickups, that first time as a family will be rough and not the least bit fun. Your otherwise intelligent children may claim to have never known where scissors or glue or toothpaste go. They will suddenly feel exhausted and suffer headaches and leg pain, and they may stare blankly past your shoulder in confusion when you remind them where you’ve kept the laundry hamper for all the days of their lives. The first day will be horrible. Working together, you’ll get significantly less done than if you had done it by yourself. You’ll spend the entire time directing and reminding and threatening motivating.This is one of my favorite passages, about how she would kill herself cleaning and organizing, only to find herself back where she started: After all that work, all that sweat and stress and angst, I’d swear I was going to keep my home this way. This time. Three days later, I looked around and gasped. My home was worse than it was before I started cleaning for the party. Clutter had reappeared, dishes were piled in the sink, and the floor was scattered with dirty socks. All that work, and I had been betrayed. My project energy was gone, and my heart was broken once again by my cruelly messy house. With each failure, my cynicism increased. I accepted the hopelessness of my situation a little more. The problem? Those three days between Party Ready and Disaster Status. They were a black hole in my Slob Brain. I honestly didn’t understand what had happened during those three days. "My cruelly messy house" perfectly describes how I feel sometimes.I also got a copy of a short bonus book called 14 Days to Opening Your Front Door to Guests. This is a single-purpose book; it's only about what to do if your house is a disaster and you're having guests over (for whatever reason, it doesn't have to be Thanksgiving). It's also possibly the single most useful book on the subject I've ever read; it's got laser focus and pulls no punches about the goal. If you pre-order the book, you get this little book as a bonus.Conclusion: if you're a messy person with housekeeping problems, you need this book. Plus it's really fun to read.I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.