Boredom leads to shiny sink

I've never been what you'd call an organized person. I'm certainly not a neat freak. If my room wasn't a total mess when I was growing up, it was still cluttered, with a "residue" of mess around the edges , stacks of books and papers, a messy desk and a layer of dust so thick in some places that an archaeologist might have a little fun excavating my trinkets.

Don't get me started on the hair balls that could be scraped off of my carpet or pulled out of the vacuum cleaner. (Of course, with waist-length hair, the hair balls are inevitable no matter how often one vacuums.) My three closets were the stuff of Flip This House nightmares.

Anyway...there's a point to all of this. I, like any other kid (I hope), had to clean my room sometimes. By the time it came to this, though, the mess was always really overwhelming.

As a perfectionist (and an impatient one at that), room-cleaning was always a bit of a battle, as one might imagine. In the midst of one of these battles, my mother devised a method that would forever change the way I cleaned my room: BBBC-Bed, Buddies, Books, Clothes. I still don't think she realizes how brilliant this list is. You clean or neaten each thing in the order of the list-make your bed; pick up all "buddies" (what my family called plush toys); pick up and straighten all books and put away all clothes ("away" meaning in a drawer/closet or in the laundry hamper).

Usually, doing these four things didn't take more than an hour, and my room would look at least 70 percent cleaner. Having a method provided me with two things when cleaning my room: 1) It gave me a place to start, and 2) It made progress visible very quickly. Both things are very heartening when faced with the daunting task of a huge mess.

I'm a good bit older now, and I have greater cleaning responsibilities than just my room. While it's not large, I have an entire apartment to worry about, with different mess compositions in each room. I'm just as much of an impatient perfectionist as ever and still just as much of a slob.

I don't have my mother breathing down my neck anymore to clean up after myself, but there is something to be said for not living in total chaos all the time. I have to get around to cleaning up eventually, lest I run out of clean dishes or clean clothes.

I was musing about all of this late one night, lamenting that there just didn't seem to be a good method like BBBC that applied to cleaning the whole house. A couple of days later, I found a thread on an online communities raving about FlyLady.net. The site provides step-by-step lessons and tips for organizing your life through setting routines and forging habits.

I'm really not sure about how much I buy into her whole system, but the site really does have some wonderful tips and guidelines for getting your house (and life) in order without having household chores take over your life. Specifically, and most importantly for me, it has that all-important "quick list" that I'd been looking for that would make that one-hour massive improvement in the neatness of my house: the "Weekly Home Blessing Hour."

Set a timer for 10 minutes for a household task: vacuum, dust, mop, etc. Stop the task when the timer goes off, and move to the next one. Go as fast as you can.

If you don't get to everything, don't worry, just start there next week. If a task takes less than 10 minutes, just reset your timer and move on. When you're done, you're done. You only have to do it once a week, and it puts just enough of a "dent" into the mess you've got to inspire you to do more later.

FlyLady also has a few other tips that work in conjunction with the "Blessing Hour," including five-minute "hot spot" cleanings, 15-minute decluttering sessions, and most important of all, sink polishing.

Yes, I said sink polishing.

I thought it was crazy, too, but I had a little extra time on my hands one night, so I thought, "What the hell; I'll give it a try." After getting the initial shine, it only takes a couple of minutes each day to keep it up, and the shiny sink alone makes your kitchen look 100 times cleaner. And with such a clean, shiny, brand-new-looking sink, you don't want to mess it up by leaving dishes in it, either.

Seriously. Here I am, a self-professed impatient, perfectionist, overworked, underpaid slob, and something as crazy as polishing my sink has caused a sort of disease of cleanliness to begin to spread through my house.

Most of the people reading this don't know me and have no reason to believe that I'm not really some mini Martha Stewart (with or without the insider trading...take your pick) but just trust me on this one. Polish your kitchen sink.