housekeeping for geeks

[coraa]

I am kind of embarrassed to admit that the Flylady method of housekeeping actually, apparently, works for me. Embarrassed because it is possibly the least cool thing in the history of ever -- I mean, when you follow a system designed for and by middle-aged Christian stay-at-home moms, complete with twee inspirational messages and purple fairies on everything, you pretty much lose all claim to being hip. (Granted, I already have pretty much forfeited claims of being hip, what with, e.g., my tendency to go to bed by 11pm, but there you go.)

That being said, I feel much more satisfied with my "Control Journal" (basically, the list of housekeeping routines, shopping lists, etc., stored in a three-ring binder) now that I've replaced the cheery house-fairy image on the front with a picture of Riza Hawkeye and Roy Mustang (from Fullmetal Alchemist), and added another picture of Celes Chere and Locke Cole (from Final Fantasy 6) to the back. I may need a cute binder of housekeeping routines to keep the house in some semblance of order, but I can at least have asskicking women and the men who love them on it, dagnabbit.

(I may post more about my trial and error with the Flylady method, and how I've tweaked it for my own, non-mom, day-job-working, no-shoes-in-the-house, non-conservative-Christian self, later.)

Comments

[zellandyne.livejournal.com]

I would certainly be interested in that.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Cool! I will definitely post on it, then.

[geekjul.livejournal.com]

I'm curious to know how you make it work for you. I tried it a couple of years ago and I just couldn't deal with the emails, really. I'm like you, non-mom, day-job-working, non-conservative-Christian. I can see the benefits of the system, I just couldn't figure out how to make it work for me. But jebus knows, I need some sort of system around here!

[coraa.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I decided to try it again was that they've actually revamped the way e-mail is used -- back when I first tried a couple of years ago, there were like twenty to forty emails a day, including a ton of reminders that were timed for east-coast people. Yowch. The reminders have been replaced by a once-daily 'flight plan' with all the reminders in one e-mail, so the e-mail volume is down to more like ten a day. Which is... a lot, but an amount that I can skim and filter much more reasonably.

I've still had to make a lot of tweaks, though. Definitely something to post about!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Same here, same here--though the email alone would drive me batso. And NO SHOES!

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yes -- I cheerfully do it with no shoes, and I have my e-mail program set up to filter many of the e-mails directly to the trash. It did take some fiddling to make it work for me.

[2gouda4u.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of this before, and I couldn't help but laugh when I read the bit on flylady.net about wearing shoes. Particularly the part about shoes being a necessity for being professional, read while curled up at my desk at work wearing no shoes.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there are a lot of individual things like that that are a bit... peculiar. The thing is, they seem to work for a lot of the target audience (I think the 'get dressed, do your hair, put on shoes' thing is aimed at women who are stay-at-home moms and never get out of their pyjamas all day, and I can see how actually getting dressed could have a psychological impact)... but without that context, they just seem silly, and even in context, they aren't for everyone.

Learning to use the method is contingent on cheerfully dumping any element that's irrelevant for you -- for me, the routines and zone cleaning is what's useful; the rest can be analyzed and discarded at will. But it varies from person to person, what's useful and what's irrelevant.

(The whole site is unlikely to be of any use to you, given the immaculate state of your home every time I've been over. I suspect you are what the Flylady culture calls a 'Born Organized.' ;) )

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

mmm....pajamas. I love pajamas. Now where are my big, fat, pink curlers and large, overly-fluffy, magenta slippers.

[erinpie.livejournal.com]

I'd love to hear your thoughts about flylady too!!

[coraa.livejournal.com]

:D

I'm definitely going to post my thoughts, then. There seems to be some interest!

[ceph.livejournal.com]

I think Riza Hawkeye is definitely a more appropriate image for a "Control Journal."

[coraa.livejournal.com]

You don't even need to be in Soviet Russia for Hawkeye to control YOU.

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

Wow... the website design... it burns!

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. As I said, neither I nor you nor pretty much anyone reading my journal is in the target audience for the aesthetic. (The site is so very popular, though, that the aesthetic clearly works for someone.)

[ceph.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the commonalities are between FlyLady and an organization system like Getting Things Done. GTD has an aesthetic focus on corporate management types in the same general sense as FlyLady has an aesthetic focus on stay-at-home mothers; perhaps if you could distill out the things that show up in both systems, you would have something pretty universal.

Sort of reminds me of something NL used to talk about, that people are more likely to use something if it seems like it's tailored for their particular situation. Now I sort of want to go and see how many other organization systems are out there right now--for nerds, for artists, for academics, et cetera.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting question. Actually, I read that the GTD guy was surprised that the GTD plan had been adopted so enthusiastically by the geeky/Lifehacker-y set -- he'd designed it to appeal to management types, not devs, engineers and geeks. It's interesting, not only how fairly similar principles can be designed to appeal to very different demographics, but how one might think they're aiming at one demographic and actually wind up hitting another.

[dannielo.livejournal.com]

For implementing GTD you can use this web-based application:

http://www.Gtdagenda.com (http://www.gtdagenda.com)

You can use it to manage your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts, use checklists, schedules and a calendar.
A mobile version is available too.