This is the trick to keeping any living space looking immaculate.
It’s actually fairly simple; there's only two steps.
I'd say it's well worth it.
The first step is to establish a "set point.”
Anything that comes into the space needs to be assigned to a “spot.”
This is great if you’re just moving into a place,
but it’s harder to do once you’ve already been living there for a while.
If you have the money, you could always hire a professional organizer to help you
set this standard for “where things go,” but I just would recommend that you remove
all of the stuff from the space that you’re working on and then put back only the
stuff you actually use, one by one, until you have a spot figured out for each item.
Share this “set point” with anyone you live with, so they understand that everything has a correct place.
And now we’re on to the second step already: “put things back.”
Because everything has a “correct place,” I don’t have to think about HOW to clean when I'm cleaning.
I’m literally just putting things back in their correct places.
I do this either at the end of the activity or at the end of the day,
so that when I wake up in the morning, it’s to a newly-cleaned, set house.
If you share a living space with other people, agreeing to “put things back”
into their spots is a conscientious way to live - it allows the next person to come in and use the
objects or the space for their own projects without having to clean up your mess first.
When I come home from a long trip, it takes me less than five minutes to unpack,
because I can just dump out my bags and put stuff back in their places.
And it’s no more difficult to put something in its “correct place” than it is to put it in its
“incorrect place." Plus, I don't have to deal with the stress of a messy house.
I just dump stuff out, return the objects to their “places,” and move on with my day, stress-free.
And that’s it.
But how do I even choose which objects to bring into my life in the first place?