If you have three changes to your outlook, they should be:
- The OHIO rule
- Everything has a place, everything in its place
- Shut down the kitchen at night
OHIO = Only Handle It Once. That means, with a yogurt pot lid, the minute your hand touches it to rip it off, that's the last time you handle it. When you put it down, it's only in a bin. If it's at a meal with plates and there's leftovers to bin you can add to the pile of leftovers to scrape into the bin, but what you can't do is dump it just anywhere!
Also, part of the problem is things not having their place, so you dump it just anywhere. If it had a place, then it gets out in its place. So step one here has to be going through everything you leave lying around and ask yourself, "where do other people keep this sort of thing, in their homes?" If you don't know, ask mumsnet!
So, for example, I have a key holder that I always hang keys on. There's a shoe cupboard right by the door, right near the hooks for coats. You can do it! If you've ever hung your coat up and opened a kitchen cupboard for a clean plate, you're already doing it. You just need to find a place for the other stuff.
And lastly, shutting the kitchen down every night. This is powerfully worth every effort before you go to bed. Not only do you wake up and come down to a pristine, clean environment (which is good for the mental health!), you also kill two birds with one stone.
Shutting down the kitchen involves clearing the draining board, emptying the dishwasher, wiping all the kitchen and cooker worktops, and making sure the floor is clean. Most people find a quick sweep is sufficient, other people use their robot hoovers. Part of being able to empty the draining board involves doing a quick sweep of downstairs to gather up any plates or cups that you may have missed earlier in the day. Personally, in my house, plates and cups are banned from going upstairs anyway, so if you haven't started that, don't! But if it's a bad habit you've already got into, maybe keep all your eating and drinking downstairs? It's kind of funny because, when you're collecting cups from downstairs areas, it's so easy to straighten cushions pick up blankets off the floor, rescue remote controls from down the sofa cushions, that sort of thing. Before you know it, with minimal effort, you've left it looking great.
These things really don't take long to do as well I remember once waiting at the traffic lights, so frustrated they had stopped me. I decided out of idle curiosity to time how long it was, and it was one minute 15 seconds. I was so surprised because it felt like it was more like 10 minutes! Another set of traffic lights was only 45 seconds. Some jobs feel like they take such a long time you haven't got time to start them, but I also time to myself wiping down the toilet and cleaning the sink downstairs, and was amazed to find it is less than a minute to do both those tasks. When you think about it like that, what is 'less than a minute' between friends! It's the same when you are closing down the house at night.