Hi there! You are listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

Today is episode 298, How to Keep Up with Household Habits. This is a constant nag, isn't it? No matter who you are or where you live, there are household tasks that you want to keep up with consistently.

And rarely do you feel like you do that well. It's just easy to feel behind in our homes. Like everything is at best, a sneeze away from falling apart.

So today we're going to talk about how to choose the household habits that matter to you and how you might keep up with actually doing them.

After this episode is over, I really think you're going to feel revived when it comes to your own home and how you see the tasks that you want to do.

So let's jump in. First, I want us to talk about how to choose the household habits that matter to you. The list of things that we can do in our homes to keep it clean and tidy and well maintained and organized and all those responsibility words.

It's a very long list. There are so many things that you could be doing every day to make your home function in a specific way.

That you are a person, you are a person with many responsibilities outside of your home that take up a lot of your time.

You are also a person who wants to enjoy their weekend, not just spend the whole time on house projects and cleaning tasks.

So the point here is that you do have a lot to do and it is unlikely that you can do all the things for your home that you think you should.

Or it's unlikely that you can do all the things for your home that you even want to do without some kind of effort.

That's the kicker, right? House stuff is not super fun.

They're chores. It's cleaning bathrooms and paying bills and organizing closets and figuring out what to do with the big pile of clothes that your kid doesn't fit into anymore.

I think that's one of the biggest challenges actually. Most of these things, they just aren't super fun. You don't look forward to them.

They don't offer huge dividends outside of satisfaction or enjoying a cleaner or tidy room.

Which, I mean, that isn't important dividend, but you're not being paid to do this stuff. You have to do it because you're grown up. It's kind of a drag.

When I was newly married and in my early 20s, I just cringe thinking about this. I had this dry erase calendar on my fridge that it was for an entire year, right?

It was likely in like 2006. I think it was in that range because that's when I first met Emily P. Freeman.

And she saw this calendar on my fridge when she and her husband John came over for dinner for the first time. It is a wonder that she stayed my friend after seeing this calendar because it was the most unhinged, genius thing I could possibly do.

I was so worried about getting it wrong in my home, especially as a young, new wife that I gathered as much information as humanly possible from many, many sources, namely real simple and worth a steward.

To collect the entirety of housekeeping knowledge so that I could organize it and not miss a thing. So I bought this dry erase annual calendar in every single day of that calendar. No breaks, no breaks.

I put down the household tasks that I needed to do. And then like the frequency with which I should do them. So, you know, every three months, I had it on my calendar to dust the baseboards because that's what that's how often you're supposed to dust your baseboards is every three months according to Martha.

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