Flylady is cluttering my inbox

The irony of it. The website that claims to help you declutter your home doesn’t seem to give any thought to the amount of clutter it fills your inbox with. I have no idea how many emails a day I get from flylady but it must be between 10 and 20. And from what I can tell only one of those is relevant to my needs. That’s the one with the daily plan.

The rest of the emails read like case studies for JML and they’re starting to drive me crazy. I get it – the rubba scrubba can clean anything and ideally you should have one for every room in your house. And it will change your life.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot of good advice on that site. Mid-way through my maternity leave I was starting to really let the housework get on top of me. Days would go by and the house would get messier and messier, and then jt would finally get to be too much and we’d have to spend an entire weekend putting it right.

Another mama told me about flylady so I decided to see what all the fuss was about. And I started as flylady suggests by shining my sink. I never go to bed now without having the dishes done and the sink clean. And flylady is right. Somehow that little step makes you feel better when you start the following day with a clean sink.

The other piece of advice I’ve taken to heart is the laundry advice. Each day do one load of laundry. She calls it rebooting your laundry. So we try our best to do this. We don’t always succeed, but when we manage it at least a few evenings a week, it makes such a difference to our weekend.

And the final piece of advice that has made such a difference is meal planning. Every Friday night, we plan our dinners for the following week. And on Saturday morning or Sunday morning, we shop for whatever we need to make those meals. During the week, on the days we both work, that meal plan takes all the stress out of cooking. No decisions to be made. Just check the calendar, see what has to be cooked, and cook it. And then when you’re done, check what’s on the calendar for tomorrow, and take the meat out to defrost. It makes things so easy. And it’s easier to ensure that our meals are balanced through the week.

So why when she has all this good advice to offer, does flylady still annoy me? It all comes down to clutter. The emails are not in the spirit of the site. They are clutter, pure and simple. And I think it’s time to get rid of them. Thank you flylady. I’ve learned a lot. Now could you let me teach you a thing or two about document design and the fine line between interesting newsletter to which I’ve subscribed, and annoying spam. Such a shame.