141 - Why Can't I Keep On Top of My Home?

Summary:

If you've ever put loads of time and energy into decluttering and getting organised, only to watch it completely unravel the second life gets difficult, this episode is for you. Heather talks through one of the most common patterns she sees in client homes and inside the Untangled Life membership: building systems that only work when everything is going well. She explains why that happens, what to do instead, and how designing for your worst week actually makes your best weeks even easier.

In This Episode:

00:00 Why does it all go wrong?
Heather opens with something so many people experience but rarely talk about. You do all the work, you create the system, and then one hard week hits and it looks like a bomb's gone off. She explains exactly why that happens and why it is not a discipline problem.

05:38 The fantasy self problem
The system you built was probably built for a version of you that was rested, on top of things, and having a decent week. Heather talks through why that's such a natural trap to fall into, and why it's also the thing quietly sabotaging your home.

09:17 The fallback system fix
The solution isn't a better system. It's a system with a built-in backup for the hard days. Heather walks through a practical example involving bathroom towels and airing cupboards, and explains how to find the right fallback for your own home.

Have you bought your ticket to DeclutterCon 2026 yet? Its going to be AMAZING! full of new ways of thinking, support, companies to support your decluttering and accountability to make changes when you get home - all without the overwhelm or judgement. An Untangling Community coming together. 10/10/26, Sheffield UK. www.decluttercon.co.uk for details.

Transcript

heather (00:00)
Hello, Untanglers, and welcome back to another episode of Decluttering Untangled with me, your host, Heather Tingle. So today I want to talk about something I see pretty often in all honesty in clients' homes and in the Untangled Life membership. And it's one of those things that people create a system in an attempt to keep their homes tidy, but it kind of goes wrong so easily.

because they miss one like vital thing out of it. So if you declutter them and creating new routines or homes for your stuff or creating like better organisation and you're just about keeping on top of it but it feels really quite precarious, then this episode is for you. So where it seems to go wrong is you do all this work and then something happens. Either a busy week at work.

somebody gets ill or you just have a bad week like life's hard, everything's busy, seems like you're constantly running on a treadmill that you can't get off and it seems like everything just goes wrong in your home, it all goes to pot. So it was tiring day and you worked really hard and it got tiring and you were just about managing with it but now it looks like a bomb's hit it and you wonder why you started decluttering as your home now feels just as overwhelming.

but you've already spent a load of time and effort and energy on it and you wonder why you're bothered. So the reason for this is we build systems based on what we want to happen, what we hope will happen rather than what actually does happen. So we picture this version of ourselves and it's a really funny one where we kind of work on it on the system that we are okay.

We're having an all right week, we've been rested, we're on top of things, we're in a good routine, and it's kind of an average okay week. And we build a system based around either that version of ourselves or the better version of ourselves. Like, this is how we want to be in this home. I know it sounds a bit weird, but it sounds like it's a really sensible idea because you want to do better. You want your home to be better. Until you remember that the person who lives in your house

most or some of the time, a lot of the time is the real you on a busy week when you're poorly, you burn out or you're in a heat wave where everything's moving and everything feels too much. So let me just give you a quick example of the things I see and how that could be adjusted.

So you declutter your bathroom, you listen to one of my podcasts and think, right, I'm gonna tackle the shampoos and I'm gonna get the windowsill sorted and those million bottles in the shower, we're gonna get it sorted and I'm gonna go through it. And then you decide, well, while I'm at it, I'm doing really well with it. I'm gonna sort the airing cupboard out full of old towels. You might even treat yourself to like a new set and you think, brilliant, I've got this system because the system you create, the plan for the bath towels once they're used.

is to go straight into this laundry basket, which lives in the airing cupboard, in the middle of the landing, top of the landing, at the top of the stairs, you think great, that's easy for the entire family to put dirty or wet towels in that cupboard. Away from visitors, you can put other dirty clothes in there, and you can even buy a really nice laundry basket that fits that cupboard perfectly. And it's really neat, although it's an absolute chuff to try and get it out of there, but hey ho, it looks great. And on a really good week,

That's exactly what happens. Like, no bother. Apart from you groan every time you've to get the basket out of the airing cupboard because it's such a tight fit. And then you realise, well, I'll just lean into the basket to remove the towels once a week, but that's okay. Because the payoff for that is it's all hidden away and you get a beautiful landing. And it's lovely. think, ⁓ people could go up the stairs now and not see all my dirty laundry. Brilliant. Then someone in the house gets ill. Or it's one of those weeks where everyone's just hanging on by like a thread and you know, life's hard. And suddenly there's damp towels slung over the radiator, over the banister, draped over the door, on the back of a chair, on the floors, because walking them down the hall to the airing cupboard is just one step too far, it's a task too many. And once that starts, it snowballs because it starts off where people don't open the lid of the basket. They just plonk the stuff on top of it and then it becomes a pile and nobody else bothers to move it because they don't want to do it because it's not their stuff. And then it ends up out the front on the landing or it ends up in the bathroom because the landing is covered in towels and clothing or whatever. And it then it snowballs because there's no clear right place for them now because that system's broken down. So they just live wherever they land. And then there's now piles of laundry on the floor. They get added to with random clothes and you're so overwhelmed trying to keep up with everyone, you just pile it onto the kitchen counter next to last night's pots because you just not had a minute to sort them out either. And then because there's no room in the kitchen side, you forgot the paperwork you put on there to remind yourself to do it. You need to take that with you the next morning, you forgot about that. It then gets damp and the deadline gets forgotten about and you get takeaway for tea because the kitchen now looks like a bomb's hit it. Okay, that's how it works because the system wasn't right.

So the system of the towels and the laundry and the pots and the paperwork only worked when things were okay and going well and you had the capacity, no disasters were happening, you had a good week. And yes, it worked and you think you've cracked it until it stopped working. So you built a system based on what you hoped would happen when things were all right. And this is what I mean by building a system for your fantasy self. And I see this all the time, and that only works in ideal conditions. The second life gets hard, which let's face it, it does, the system collapses. And then you're not just dealing with the towels, you're dealing with the guilt of the system that I set up and spent so much time and effort on, which was supposed to work and be the problem solver, didn't work, which then makes it so much harder to pick it back up. Like what was the point of decluttering when it's just as bad?

but now you've spent money and a lot of time and a lot of effort and now you've got less towels because you decluttered loads of them, so it's even more stressful. So what's the fix? You build a fallback system. So you have to create a system based on your worst possible week or days, not on a good day. So in the towel example, that might mean putting a small basket or a hook in the bathroom. On a good week, the towels can go straight into the air and cover basket like that's easy.

Brilliant. But on a hard week, you've removed the lid to the airing cupboard, maybe even the door to the airing cupboard. They go in the bathroom basket instead, which yeah, it's in the room where you drop in the towel. So it's so much easier, so much less stress. They go in the bathroom basket, no decisions needed, no extra steps, no extra shame. And then once a week or whenever your capacity allows, that basket gets emptied into the main wash.

The point is that the bathroom basket is the proper system and the airing cupboard system is the backup perfect one for when things are going great.

You're just removing the assumption that you'll always have the energy to do the longer route. So to walk down the corridor, to open the cupboard, to open the basket and put it in there, and then have the energy to take it back out again. So this applies way beyond things like towels, by the way, obviously. like dishes, post, laundry, all these systems, anything with multiple steps between used or put away properly.

Wherever you've seen things pile up in the same spot over and over, you'll get those doom piles happening. It's not a discipline problem. That's your home telling you that the system you built was built for someone who hasn't had a hard week, which let's be honest, how often do we have a week where everything goes to plan? I mean, not in my world, that does not happen. So if you want to try this, what I would suggest you do is pick one thing in your home that keeps ending up being dumped somewhere or in the wrong place.

and ask yourself, what does this version look like on a really bad week? How can it be made better? Then build a drop zone or a fallback of some description for that version of you. Not the one who was having a great week with loads of capacity, but the one where you are on your knees just about holding life together. You're not lowering your standards. You're working with it to make your standards maintainable, which increases them automatically.

So you're designing for the person who lives there in all your different states, not the best one, because if you can make it so the system works when you're at your lowest, then when you're having a great week, the system is so effortless, it's amazing. If you need help figuring out what that system looks like, one of the easiest things is to look at the barriers you would face. So imagine you've got a really bad flu.

What would be the best solution for those items if you could barely move and felt really rubbish? I mean, to be fair, that is me a lot of the time. So would you bother walking down the hallway? Would you have the energy to open the cupboard? Would you then have the energy to open the basket lid just to put a towel, one towel that you currently have in your hand in the right place? Or would you find some kind of shortcut that was kind of a halfway system that maybe didn't look as amazing, but did its job?

A lot of people think it's almost like cheating to do something like this, like you're making life easier for yourself and it's not perfect because you see other homes manage to live like that. Well, good for them, although do they really or is it just that you only see their edited version of their home? It might also not look as pretty or gorgeous home aesthetic, but you know what? Having a home that works for you and your fluctuating needs 
where you're able to conserve energy by not battling your home all the time. It's amazing what that extra capacity then gives you to do other stuff with your home to make it beautiful for yourself, as well as functional, because that's the home that you want, one that is unique for you and works for you. So I hope that has given you something to consider. And if you need help to find better systems, pop into the Facebook group and ask, because I'm in there all the time and I can give you advice and suggestions of things to try. So I hope that helps. Also, really, really, really cheeky little ask. I would really love it if you could give me a Google review on Untangled by Tingle or a review wherever you're listening to this podcast because it makes such a difference. Kind of like when we first like launched, we get loads of reviews because everybody's really excited about it. And then we kind of like don't get any. And you know, I'm ADHD and I need feedback. So please.

give me some reviews because it also means that the algorithms push our information out to other people and I wanna get to as many people as possible to let them realise like they're not alone and they're not lazy. So there you go, thank you. That's a massive thank you from me. So until next time, remember you're not alone, be kind to yourself and keep untangling.