Use the Junebug Cleanup Method When Clutter Gets Overwhelming
I am not a neat person by nature. I try, but it’s never been a particularly easy or intuitive process. In calmer times, I can survive, but when life gets chaotic, which is now almost constant, keeping the house clean seems like an almost impossible task. During this time, I learned one handy survival trick, the Junebug cleaning method.
This is a cleaning method for people who not only clean poorly, but are exhausted, exhausted, distracted, and have only a few crumbs of executive function left. The cockchafer method isn’t the most efficient cleaning method, nor is it the most photogenic, but it will get you started even when the simple act seems impossible.
What is “junbagging”?
Just like the cockchafer tries to get through different places on the window grate over and over again, cockchafer cleaning is when you choose a specific place in the house that you want to clean, such as a kitchen sink that is piled up. dirty dishes and then return to the same place over and over again, no matter how many times you wander off to do something else.
Junebugging is distraction-driven cleaning, where you put a piece of dirty dishes in the dishwasher only to be distracted by a pile of laundry to be sent to the washer, which reminds you of millions of LEGOs scattered around. through the living room floor, which then brings your attention back to the dishes on the kitchen counter, which then takes you back to the kitchen sink, where you put a few more dirty dishes in the dishwasher again, and (finally) turn it on. As Megan Griffith writes for Yahoo :
It is not about completing tasks in an orderly, step-by-step manner. It’s about doing something, even if it’s not what you intended to do. You can start 20 different small cleaning tasks and only finish five, but that’s a lot better than if you were overwhelmed and doing nothing at the beginning. Maybe I didn’t load the dishes and instead started doing the laundry because I saw my husband’s socks, or maybe I took my son’s toys because I tripped over them while walking from the couch to the laundry, or maybe i even went grocery shopping because i realized we were out of dishwasher tablets.
In between, there’s likely to be a kid whining about snacks, a phone call from a contractor about the cost of fixing your plumbing, and work emails to answer.
Instead of using what little mental energy you have left to plan and prioritize what needs to be cleared, sometimes it’s better to just sink into chaos doing what needs to be done in front of you with the only conscious thought: get back to the original location you were trying to clear. Considering how jaded and exhausted you are at the start of it all, even those clean dishes and fresh clothes are going to feel like a goddamn miracle.