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coraa(This post will probably not make a ton of sense if you haven't seen the prior "Cora Interprets FlyLady So You Don't Have To" posts, so here are direct links: Part One: Caveats and Things You Can Ignore, and Part Two: Things I Actually Do Use.)
I've had a couple of requests to see my routines and zone cleaning schedule, so I will provide that this afternoon sometime, when I get a chance to type it up after work.
But this post is for a topic thatjonquil reminded me of, which is this: some of the things on the FlyLady site are not just aesthetically not to my taste or weirdly dogmatic about shoes, they're actually offensive. And while I wanted to keep the rant out of the 'here's what has helped me' posts, it would probably be a good idea to acknowledge that and warn you about the offensive stuff as well -- and tell you how I circumvented it.
After the rant-y bit, I'm adding additional notes on things I did to reduce or remove the objectionable biases from the method for my own use. I'll cut that separately so you can jump straight there if you want to avoid the politics and anger. ;)
This is not to say "you shouldn't use the system." I do, after all, since I think it's entirely possible to strip out the objectionable stuff and end up with a bare-bones system that doesn't make offensive assumptions. It is to say "you should maybe be careful on the website, and be aware of these things beforehand." If you want to avoid the website entirely, part of the reason that I laid out what I do use so, uh, verbosely is that ideally, you could use the stripped-down version of the method without going to the site, getting the e-mails, or otherwise subjecting yourself to the offensive stuff. So you can always save yourself some blood pressure by just avoiding it entirely. (That is, in fact, part of why I titled these posts "Cora Interprets FlyLady So You Don't Have To.")
Things That Are Objectionable That You Might Want To Be Aware Of
The big one -- the biggest one, by far -- is the question of sex roles and gender stereotypes. And they are rampant. Essentially, the sex roles that the site assumes are... not 1950s, not as they actually were, but 1950s-as-romanticized-in-imagination-by-modern-conservatives. It is assumed that you, the person reading the site, are a woman; that you, as a woman, are the one responsible for your housekeeping; that this is as it should be; that men, at best, 'help,' and are not responsible for the house. The site assumes that you will be solely responsible for the house, and that your husband (oh yeah, it also assumes you'll be married, and to a man) won't play any significant part in housework.
I don't need to tell any of you how furious this makes me, do I? I know many of you have heard my opinion, that housework is (or should be) the responsibility of everyone who lives in the house who is physically capable. (That isn't to say that I think there's a problem with one partner working part-time or staying home and taking on a larger share of the housework, or of dividing up tasks so that, say, one person does more errands and another does more housework, but that partner doing the housework doesn't need to be the woman and the default assumption should not be that one person -- the woman -- is responsible.) I think the idea that women are responsible for the home and that men, at best, "help" (I hate that word in this context; "help" implies assisting someone with a task that's theirs, not having tasks of your own), is really bad. Haaaaate.
And it's tied into an idea that, if possible, makes me even more angry: that marital problems are caused by the housework being poorly-done, and that if you want to fix your marriage you'll just handle everything yourself. You see, the way to resolve fights about chores is to not expect the other person to do anything! Argh. Now, I can accept, in some contexts, the idea that you can't really change other people, but that doesn't mean that it's a good thing to make one person do all the heavy lifting. Indeed,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jmpava, my partner, is terrible at clutter-perception -- but that doesn't mean he does no housework, it means he has tasks that don't require clutter-perception (dishwashing, laundry, etc.). "You can't change other people" is not an excuse for "women do all the housework forever, because it's their lot in life."
The issue goes even beyond the question of sex roles/gender expectations; it's implied that asking for or needing help is kind of a failing in general. Not a huge failing, but... well, there's an implication that you should be able to handle it all yourself, and that if you have to get assistance (from your husband, your kids, or a hired housekeeping/maid service) that you're kind of letting down the team. This is, to be perfectly honest, bullshit. Expecting the people you live with to do some work around the help (within their abilities) is not unreasonable. Hiring someone to help pick up the slack in a busy life (or to do things that everybody in the house hates to do) makes perfect sense if you can afford it. Argh.
(As I said, at the end of this, I'll have tips for how to use the system when more than one person is doing housework -- male or female.)
There are other issues. One, as I alluded to above, is the heteronormativity. It's assumed that you are a woman, married to a man; there are some nods to the possibility that you might be a single woman. There are few to no acknowledgments of the possibility that you might be a man (single or otherwise), but there are really no acknowledgments that you might be a woman married to/living with a woman, or a man married to/living with a man. Gay people don't seem to exist at all. Then there's a health-and-weight-management sideline program that makes me see red -- it's called "Body Clutter," and that title enough is enough to make body-positivity-and-fat-acceptance-blog-reading me mad. The site also more or less assumes that you're a Christian (there actually isn't much proselytizing, but that's because the site just assumes that you already are one), and not just Christian but a certain kind of conservative Christian.
The site doesn't exactly assume that you're a stay-at-home-mom (it does assume, very often, that you're a mom of some stripe, which means filtering out a lot of irrelevant info if you're not, but that's less offensive than just mildly annoying to me), but the way that work-outside-the-house people are referenced is... problematic. She repeatedly -- so much so that it became really obvious really fast -- refers to "if you choose to work outside the home." Choose choose choose, over and over, not just "if you work outside the home" but "if you choose to work outside the home." This got my back up because, well, for one thing, it's sometimes just not true: my mother "chose" to work outside the home because we "chose" to continue to eat and pay the mortgage; we needed a second income. But also, men's jobs are never referred to like that -- and the implication is that, if you're "choosing" to work outside the home, it's kinda your fault that housework is difficult, whereas men don't "choose" to work outside the home, they just do, because it's natural for them. Argh, again.
I'm sure there's more -- this is not an exhaustive list -- but that's enough for now. Onward to...
How To Exorcise The Bad Stuff Without Losing Your Mind
The first thing, the most important thing, is to not get too hung up on the e-mails. You don't need them at all. If you do like some of them, filter the rest out and don't look at them. A good portion of the bad stuff is in the e-mails, particularly the testimonials. You can cut the objectionable ratio way, way down by just not subscribing to them. And you really don't need them.
In a similar vein, you can get rid of a lot of the bad stuff by minimizing visits to the website. I think I've given enough pointers that you don't need to go there at all (and if not, ask me and I'll clarify). If you do want to go there, steer clear of anything labeled 'inspirational' or 'testimonial,' and stick to the straightforward how-to stuff.
On a more practical note: some specific tips for how to modify the program such that the objectionable assumptions are no longer present.
Using the system when you aren't the only person doing housework:
I genuinely believe that the system can be made to work just fine with multiple people doing housework. (I'm not going to get into the negotiations of what's a fair division of labor here, because that's not my business and will depend on your situation; I'm just assuming a situation where one person isn't solely responsible.) There's a couple of ways:
1. Create the control journal for yourself, and just leave off the chores that the other person is doing. This is what I do for several things -- dishwashing, laundry, catbox-cleaning, etc. Those chores are not mine, they'rejmpava's chores. So they don't go in my routines and they don't go on my zone cleaning list. It's up to him to decide how he wants to make sure those get done; I really don't care so long as they do get done. This works great if you each (or all, if there's more than two of you) have a discrete set of tasks that you are responsible for; you use the control journal to keep track of your own tasks, and the other person does whatever they want to do to keep track of theirs.
1a. Each of you gets a control journal of your very own, containing only the things that are your tasks. This really is only going to work if you each (or all) want to use this method, since foisting the system on somebody who doesn't want it is going to end in tears. But if you do have a household where more than one person is interested, you can break up the tasks as above, and just create two (or more) sets of non-overlapping routines.
2. Create a generalized household control journal, including all the tasks that need to get done, and leave it in a central location (the kitchen or the living room or something). As people go about the day, they pick a few tasks from the list and strike them off when they're done. If you want to make sure that things are evenly distributed, you can use different-colored pens or initial the finished items instead of striking them off so that you can see who's doing how much; if you aren't concerned about uneven distribution of labor, you can skip that part. This assures that some reasonable percentage of the daily tasks are done, but without splitting them up between people -- useful if you don't want one person to always do the dishes, another to always do the vacuuming, etc.
3. A hybrid, which is what I do. Tasks that are not mine, ever (dishwashing, for instance), don't go in my binder at all, as per 1. Tasks that rotate between us go on my list as a 'see whether X is done' item. For instance, taking out the bucket of compostable kitchen waste is an unpleasantly smelly task that nonetheless needs to be done frequently, so we try to rotate it between us (althoughceph has actually been a hero and done it more often than any of us, for which I am grateful). For this rotating task, I put a note a couple times a week that says 'check compostables;' if it's been done (or is at a state where it's still ignorable), I can go about my business; if it hasn't, I can decide at that point whether to take it out myself or holler at someone else to do it.
4. If you're hiring someone to do some of the housework, how you handle it will depend what they do and how frequently. If it's a task that only needs to be done as often as they do it (say they wash the kitchen floor every other week, and you don't feel the need to wash it more often), you can leave it off the routine entirely. If it's a task that needs to be done more often (say they vacuum once a month, but you want the carpets cleaner than that), you can add it to the routine and then just skip it/cross it off as 'done' the week the housekeeping/maid service is there.
How to modify the system if you have a day job:
A lot of the timing of the routines and notifications kind of assume that you're not working a full day outside the home, but you can modify them so that they still work. (I count myself in this category; while I do work from home, I work an ordinary eight-hour day from home, and so I don't have the time to take forty-five minutes off for an after-lunch routine.) This is fairly simple: just set up your routines such that they're timed in accordance with your schedule. I have a morning (before-work) routine, an after-work routine (done around 5 or 6), and an evening (before-bed) routine. This works just fine.
Her default day-of-the-week routines are actually what needed the most work. By default, they set up Saturday and Sunday as light on the chores, so that you can just relax. This is a nice idea in theory; in practice, if you work all day, you are probably not going to come home raring to go with scrubbing the bathtub, even if it needs it. So figure out what you will have energy (or time -- some chores are just more time-consuming than others and need a longer block of available time) for on weekdays, and stick the stuff that, realistically, you won't, on the weekends. Or keep one weekend day free of heavy-duty chores for relaxation and put the lengthy stuff on the other day. Or whatever works for you.
If you have a job where your hours vary a lot (as I have, in the past), you can still make it work: instead of saying, "On Thursdays, I do this, on Saturdays I do that," split the day-routines up into "long days" and "short days" or "work days" and "free days" or whatever, and then, when you do find out what your schedule is going to be, more or less, match 'em up as appropriate.
And that's it. Some things on the site are really maddening, problematic, and/or offensive, but they're not integral to the system, so I gleefully cut them out and consign them to the outer darkness. And the stripped-down version is simple enough that you don't even have to give site hits if you don't want to.
Okay, lunch break over. I'll post the routines and the zone cleaning stuff this evening. And anything else you think might be helpful, let me know.
I've had a couple of requests to see my routines and zone cleaning schedule, so I will provide that this afternoon sometime, when I get a chance to type it up after work.
But this post is for a topic that
jonquil reminded me of, which is this: some of the things on the FlyLady site are not just aesthetically not to my taste or weirdly dogmatic about shoes, they're actually offensive. And while I wanted to keep the rant out of the 'here's what has helped me' posts, it would probably be a good idea to acknowledge that and warn you about the offensive stuff as well -- and tell you how I circumvented it.After the rant-y bit, I'm adding additional notes on things I did to reduce or remove the objectionable biases from the method for my own use. I'll cut that separately so you can jump straight there if you want to avoid the politics and anger. ;)
This is not to say "you shouldn't use the system." I do, after all, since I think it's entirely possible to strip out the objectionable stuff and end up with a bare-bones system that doesn't make offensive assumptions. It is to say "you should maybe be careful on the website, and be aware of these things beforehand." If you want to avoid the website entirely, part of the reason that I laid out what I do use so, uh, verbosely is that ideally, you could use the stripped-down version of the method without going to the site, getting the e-mails, or otherwise subjecting yourself to the offensive stuff. So you can always save yourself some blood pressure by just avoiding it entirely. (That is, in fact, part of why I titled these posts "Cora Interprets FlyLady So You Don't Have To.")
Things That Are Objectionable That You Might Want To Be Aware Of
The big one -- the biggest one, by far -- is the question of sex roles and gender stereotypes. And they are rampant. Essentially, the sex roles that the site assumes are... not 1950s, not as they actually were, but 1950s-as-romanticized-in-imagination-by-modern-conservatives. It is assumed that you, the person reading the site, are a woman; that you, as a woman, are the one responsible for your housekeeping; that this is as it should be; that men, at best, 'help,' and are not responsible for the house. The site assumes that you will be solely responsible for the house, and that your husband (oh yeah, it also assumes you'll be married, and to a man) won't play any significant part in housework.
I don't need to tell any of you how furious this makes me, do I? I know many of you have heard my opinion, that housework is (or should be) the responsibility of everyone who lives in the house who is physically capable. (That isn't to say that I think there's a problem with one partner working part-time or staying home and taking on a larger share of the housework, or of dividing up tasks so that, say, one person does more errands and another does more housework, but that partner doing the housework doesn't need to be the woman and the default assumption should not be that one person -- the woman -- is responsible.) I think the idea that women are responsible for the home and that men, at best, "help" (I hate that word in this context; "help" implies assisting someone with a task that's theirs, not having tasks of your own), is really bad. Haaaaate.
And it's tied into an idea that, if possible, makes me even more angry: that marital problems are caused by the housework being poorly-done, and that if you want to fix your marriage you'll just handle everything yourself. You see, the way to resolve fights about chores is to not expect the other person to do anything! Argh. Now, I can accept, in some contexts, the idea that you can't really change other people, but that doesn't mean that it's a good thing to make one person do all the heavy lifting. Indeed,
jmpava, my partner, is terrible at clutter-perception -- but that doesn't mean he does no housework, it means he has tasks that don't require clutter-perception (dishwashing, laundry, etc.). "You can't change other people" is not an excuse for "women do all the housework forever, because it's their lot in life."The issue goes even beyond the question of sex roles/gender expectations; it's implied that asking for or needing help is kind of a failing in general. Not a huge failing, but... well, there's an implication that you should be able to handle it all yourself, and that if you have to get assistance (from your husband, your kids, or a hired housekeeping/maid service) that you're kind of letting down the team. This is, to be perfectly honest, bullshit. Expecting the people you live with to do some work around the help (within their abilities) is not unreasonable. Hiring someone to help pick up the slack in a busy life (or to do things that everybody in the house hates to do) makes perfect sense if you can afford it. Argh.
(As I said, at the end of this, I'll have tips for how to use the system when more than one person is doing housework -- male or female.)
There are other issues. One, as I alluded to above, is the heteronormativity. It's assumed that you are a woman, married to a man; there are some nods to the possibility that you might be a single woman. There are few to no acknowledgments of the possibility that you might be a man (single or otherwise), but there are really no acknowledgments that you might be a woman married to/living with a woman, or a man married to/living with a man. Gay people don't seem to exist at all. Then there's a health-and-weight-management sideline program that makes me see red -- it's called "Body Clutter," and that title enough is enough to make body-positivity-and-fat-acceptance-blog-reading me mad. The site also more or less assumes that you're a Christian (there actually isn't much proselytizing, but that's because the site just assumes that you already are one), and not just Christian but a certain kind of conservative Christian.
The site doesn't exactly assume that you're a stay-at-home-mom (it does assume, very often, that you're a mom of some stripe, which means filtering out a lot of irrelevant info if you're not, but that's less offensive than just mildly annoying to me), but the way that work-outside-the-house people are referenced is... problematic. She repeatedly -- so much so that it became really obvious really fast -- refers to "if you choose to work outside the home." Choose choose choose, over and over, not just "if you work outside the home" but "if you choose to work outside the home." This got my back up because, well, for one thing, it's sometimes just not true: my mother "chose" to work outside the home because we "chose" to continue to eat and pay the mortgage; we needed a second income. But also, men's jobs are never referred to like that -- and the implication is that, if you're "choosing" to work outside the home, it's kinda your fault that housework is difficult, whereas men don't "choose" to work outside the home, they just do, because it's natural for them. Argh, again.
I'm sure there's more -- this is not an exhaustive list -- but that's enough for now. Onward to...
How To Exorcise The Bad Stuff Without Losing Your Mind
The first thing, the most important thing, is to not get too hung up on the e-mails. You don't need them at all. If you do like some of them, filter the rest out and don't look at them. A good portion of the bad stuff is in the e-mails, particularly the testimonials. You can cut the objectionable ratio way, way down by just not subscribing to them. And you really don't need them.
In a similar vein, you can get rid of a lot of the bad stuff by minimizing visits to the website. I think I've given enough pointers that you don't need to go there at all (and if not, ask me and I'll clarify). If you do want to go there, steer clear of anything labeled 'inspirational' or 'testimonial,' and stick to the straightforward how-to stuff.
On a more practical note: some specific tips for how to modify the program such that the objectionable assumptions are no longer present.
Using the system when you aren't the only person doing housework:
I genuinely believe that the system can be made to work just fine with multiple people doing housework. (I'm not going to get into the negotiations of what's a fair division of labor here, because that's not my business and will depend on your situation; I'm just assuming a situation where one person isn't solely responsible.) There's a couple of ways:
1. Create the control journal for yourself, and just leave off the chores that the other person is doing. This is what I do for several things -- dishwashing, laundry, catbox-cleaning, etc. Those chores are not mine, they're
jmpava's chores. So they don't go in my routines and they don't go on my zone cleaning list. It's up to him to decide how he wants to make sure those get done; I really don't care so long as they do get done. This works great if you each (or all, if there's more than two of you) have a discrete set of tasks that you are responsible for; you use the control journal to keep track of your own tasks, and the other person does whatever they want to do to keep track of theirs.1a. Each of you gets a control journal of your very own, containing only the things that are your tasks. This really is only going to work if you each (or all) want to use this method, since foisting the system on somebody who doesn't want it is going to end in tears. But if you do have a household where more than one person is interested, you can break up the tasks as above, and just create two (or more) sets of non-overlapping routines.
2. Create a generalized household control journal, including all the tasks that need to get done, and leave it in a central location (the kitchen or the living room or something). As people go about the day, they pick a few tasks from the list and strike them off when they're done. If you want to make sure that things are evenly distributed, you can use different-colored pens or initial the finished items instead of striking them off so that you can see who's doing how much; if you aren't concerned about uneven distribution of labor, you can skip that part. This assures that some reasonable percentage of the daily tasks are done, but without splitting them up between people -- useful if you don't want one person to always do the dishes, another to always do the vacuuming, etc.
3. A hybrid, which is what I do. Tasks that are not mine, ever (dishwashing, for instance), don't go in my binder at all, as per 1. Tasks that rotate between us go on my list as a 'see whether X is done' item. For instance, taking out the bucket of compostable kitchen waste is an unpleasantly smelly task that nonetheless needs to be done frequently, so we try to rotate it between us (although
ceph has actually been a hero and done it more often than any of us, for which I am grateful). For this rotating task, I put a note a couple times a week that says 'check compostables;' if it's been done (or is at a state where it's still ignorable), I can go about my business; if it hasn't, I can decide at that point whether to take it out myself or holler at someone else to do it.4. If you're hiring someone to do some of the housework, how you handle it will depend what they do and how frequently. If it's a task that only needs to be done as often as they do it (say they wash the kitchen floor every other week, and you don't feel the need to wash it more often), you can leave it off the routine entirely. If it's a task that needs to be done more often (say they vacuum once a month, but you want the carpets cleaner than that), you can add it to the routine and then just skip it/cross it off as 'done' the week the housekeeping/maid service is there.
How to modify the system if you have a day job:
A lot of the timing of the routines and notifications kind of assume that you're not working a full day outside the home, but you can modify them so that they still work. (I count myself in this category; while I do work from home, I work an ordinary eight-hour day from home, and so I don't have the time to take forty-five minutes off for an after-lunch routine.) This is fairly simple: just set up your routines such that they're timed in accordance with your schedule. I have a morning (before-work) routine, an after-work routine (done around 5 or 6), and an evening (before-bed) routine. This works just fine.
Her default day-of-the-week routines are actually what needed the most work. By default, they set up Saturday and Sunday as light on the chores, so that you can just relax. This is a nice idea in theory; in practice, if you work all day, you are probably not going to come home raring to go with scrubbing the bathtub, even if it needs it. So figure out what you will have energy (or time -- some chores are just more time-consuming than others and need a longer block of available time) for on weekdays, and stick the stuff that, realistically, you won't, on the weekends. Or keep one weekend day free of heavy-duty chores for relaxation and put the lengthy stuff on the other day. Or whatever works for you.
If you have a job where your hours vary a lot (as I have, in the past), you can still make it work: instead of saying, "On Thursdays, I do this, on Saturdays I do that," split the day-routines up into "long days" and "short days" or "work days" and "free days" or whatever, and then, when you do find out what your schedule is going to be, more or less, match 'em up as appropriate.
And that's it. Some things on the site are really maddening, problematic, and/or offensive, but they're not integral to the system, so I gleefully cut them out and consign them to the outer darkness. And the stripped-down version is simple enough that you don't even have to give site hits if you don't want to.
Okay, lunch break over. I'll post the routines and the zone cleaning stuff this evening. And anything else you think might be helpful, let me know.
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