Slacker Suggestion #1: How to clean up your crap.

It's Saturday. Prime slacking time before childbearing and careers infiltrated my life and left my house in utter chaos.

All week long the three of us have been racing to: eat breakfast, get dressed, make lunch, go to school/work, eat dinner, go to bed, and repeat. Saturday morning finds me wading through a floor strewn with dirty clothes and toys, while struggling to find a surface that isn't filled with dirty dishes or junk mail. I have no choice but to clean it up or someone's going to call the health department.

This used to take me hours to sort out, roaming from room to room trying to put it all away. No more. Here's my super-duper slacker system for getting it all under control in record time (my 1000 square foot bungalow takes one hour):

1. Grab a laundry basket,two old grocery bags (paper ones), a kitchen towel and a bottle of simple green (or other multi-purpose cleaning solution in a spray bottle).
2. Start in the living room, then move to the bedrooms, then the bathroom, then the kitchen. Trust me. The order matters. I don't have any other rooms, so if you live in a bigger house you'll have to work out your own system.
Here's the important part: DO NOT LEAVE THE ROOM UNTIL YOU ARE FINISHED CLEANING IT. No running to put things in a different room, to the trash can, to the washer, NOTHING. STAY IN THE ROOM UNTIL IT IS DONE.
3. First, go through the room and just pick up the stuff that doesn't belong in that room (dirty laundry, dirty dishes, the book you were reading on the toilet, etc). Put this stuff in the laundry basket.
4. Next, go through the room and put all the garbage in one of the brown paper bags.
5. Next, go through the room and put all the recyclables in the other brown paper bag.
6. Do a quick tidy (make the bed, fold the lap blanket in the living room, put your toothbrush away, wash the dishes, wipe the sink down in the bathroom, etc) Always work from the top down. That means: first wipe the counters/tables (this is where the towel and the cleaning solution come in). Let the crumbs and dirt fall on the floor. Don't worry about it at this point, just leave it.
7. Move to the next room. Look in the laundry basket: Is there anything in the basket that belongs in THIS room? If so, put it away now.
8. Repeat steps 3-6.
9. After you finish the kitchen, take whatever is left in the laundry basket and put it in the room it belongs in. This shouldn't take long if you have been doing step 7 throughout the house. You should now be left with a basket of dirty laundry only. You're in the kitchen, so grab a kitchen garbage bag and put all the dirty laundry in it and take it to the washer or the laundromat. Take the trash and recycling out.
10. Now go through and vaccuum or sweep/mop all the floors at once.

Voila! Time for Saturday Slacking.