The last few years have felt disproportionally hard – so Capsule, powered by our pals at Shark and Ninja, are here to figure out how to make life easier, without breaking the bank, as well as diving deeper into WHY we do what we do, the struggles we all collectively face and all that’s glorious and good about being a strong, confident woman. This edition? Home hacks that’ll actually help you keep your shit together (physically and mentally obvs).
This series is brought to you by Shark and Ninja – click here for our previous installments!
“She’s not cleaning because the house is messy. She’s cleaning because her MIND is messy”.
On one of my recent social media scrolling episodes (I’m trying to be cute by calling them ‘episodes’ rather than hours-long aimless black holes of lost time, but you know exactly what I mean) the above quote positively SCREAMED at me through the videos of puppies and babies doing cute things, chicken recipes and hair tutorials (could my algorithm BE any more basic millennial bitch).
This is what I do. When I’m feeling more anxious or stressed or sad or overwhelmed than usual, my first instinct is to clean. Then it’s to organise. Then it’s to throw out pretty much everything I own in the house, and the process of re-stocking begins as my brain returns to something resembling an equilibrium.
I’m a type-A, quite organised type of person. Everything has a place in my home, one of my biggest annoyances is that I don’t have cute and labelled containers for my pantry and my spice draw and because I work from home, everything needs to be tidy and well-ordered before I start work for the day or else I can’t get anything done. I make LISTS.
For me, having my home the way I need it to be isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity that helps my mental health truck along as best it can. And while that might not be the case for everyone, having things just as you like them on the home front, whether it’s delightfully chaotic, obsessively organised or somewhere in the middle is how we help our busy lives function.
I also asked my Capsule co-founders for their organisational hacks (for context, they both have children and aren’t as, er, annoyingly anal about things as I am) for their best home organisation hacks – Emma simply responded with ‘follow people on Instagram who know things’ (but she did also bring my attention to an absolute cracker of a hack below) and Alice just replied with ‘don’t have kids’, so, you know, all good stuff.
So, for this home edition of The Time of Your Life, I’ve scoured all the expert opinions (and hell, added in a few of my own) for the best, most reliable and occasionally zany tips, tricks and hacks for keeping it together on the home front.
Use dish racks for book shelves – this one comes via Emma, who, knowing my penchant for both books and order, forwarded me on this Instagram account @grillodesigns who uses bamboo dish racks as invisible floating bookshelves and this has made me desperate to try and drill into the wall of my rental because I can’t BELIEVE how good this looks and how much it’ll free up space on my shelves.
Get you appliances that can do it all FASTER and BETTER – what if I told you that I had a mop that vacuums AT THE SAME TIME. Because I do and I think I’m in love with it because even though I quite like vacuuming, I absolutely hate mopping. It’s the bane of my life, even more than hanging out the washing which says something. But the floor hasn’t looked as sparkly in years thanks to this bad boy because the sheer novelty of my Shark HydroVac Pro XL Cordless 3-in-1 Cleaner and it’s got to the point that I’ve needed to stop myself ‘accidentally’ spilling some coffee to whizz it up again. I genuinely don’t understand how something can mop and vacuum at the same time but I’m not questioning it (it does rugs too and even self-cleans) but I can imagine this would be a godsend if you had kids or pets. It’s a godsend for me and I just have me and a fiancé.
Build a command centre to keep things humming – as a childless woman I have no idea how my friends with kids keep on top of everything that needs remembering because it’s hard enough to figure out what me and my fiancé are up to on a regular basis. But one thing that has really helped our day-to-day admin is by creating a bit of a command centre in our house that has everything we need to function, from a place to drop our keys, to store letters and vouchers and other miscellaneous crap. We’ve taken a digital route with ours: we have an Amazon Alexa Show (I did a review of it when we first got it) which is a screen that shows our shopping list, to-do-list, reminders and calendar as well as our music playlists and photos, and it links to our phones so we’re always with our lists. It’s a game-changer if it’s your vibe – otherwise creating a paper or whiteboard system with the same information is also a great option.
Bring in the ‘one in, one out’ rule – this is one that my little brain absolutely loves in the great battle between purge and binge, so I’ve been really trying to be moderate with my purchasing by making sure that if I’m buying something, something else needs to go, and it’s been working a treat (I’m doing this with clothes specifically by not allowing myself to buy any more clothes hangers).But it works with anything else too.
Carve out a space for a ‘drop zone’ – if you’re not a pain like me and insists on everything to be put away instantly (sometimes I wonder how I managed to get engaged in the first place) or you live a human-appropriate life with children where such anal-retentive behaviour isn’t just unobtainable, it’s psychotic, then a drop zone might just be for you. No, we haven’t entered the set of The Tipping Point (side note how much EASIER are those questions than The Chase?!), a drop zone means a bin, or a shelf, or simply a space where clutter, or items that haven’t made it to their final destination, are allowed to be – stuff purgatory, if you will. It keeps the nomad stuff contained to one area, allowing it to be sorted far easier and quicker.
Actually sort out the junk drawer – even the most well-organised homes should have and do have a junk drawer, but have you thought about sorting out yours so you’re not in a frustrated, annoyed and impatient state every time you’re digging through crap to find the one AAA battery you need? Preserve you and your loved-one’s sanity by grabbing some draw dividers or other containers (I use a combo of dividers and old glass candle jars) to separate out the annoying yet important detritus of life and it really does help things tick along easier, especially in those clutch moments of great need.
Use the ‘focus 15’ method to begin – If you don’t know where to start and you think the whole thing is way too big to even begin to contemplate starting, grab your phone, set a timer for 15 minutes and absolutely go to town on one task that you can achieve, whether it’s the aforementioned junk drawer, going through the fridge to throw out every expired condiment, sorting your shoes out or labelling one part of the laundry, you’ll be on top of stuff in no time – PLUS you get the daily feeling of satisfaction that you’ve ticked off something on the to-do list.
Edit your stuff before you delete it – when you are tackling the big stuff like your wardrobe, don’t just willy-nilly chuck stuff out. Rather, pull out EVERYTHING from your wardrobe first, and then sort into categories – keep, donate, sell, not sure, what was I thinking, OMG my mother was right – so you know exactly what you’re dealing with. Then, you can sort accordingly. Knowledge is power!
Incorporate organisation into your morning or evening routine – in a similar vein to the above ‘focus 15’ method, incorporate clearing mess and clutter, and tackle micro-tasks every day by building into your morning or evening routine. I’m a morning person so I do a daily mini-sweep of my house before I settle into work for the day – a kitchen tidy, an all-over house sort and sometimes I’ll add in a larger task that needs to be done like tidy my makeup drawer (for the life of me I can’t keep that clean?!) or quickly make a shopping list for the week ahead. It works for me and I like the smug organisational feeling it gives me.
Create lists for where things are – this is a new one for our house but already it’s having a huge impact. My head is too full with work stuff at the minute to remember every single thing I need to keep on top of, so I’ve turned to my love of list making to help the house run smoothly, too. We’ve started making lists of what we have in the freezer so we’re not overbuying and we’re actually using the stuff in there, lists of things in storage in the garage so we know where things actually are, and lists of things we need/want to buy, including Christmas present ideas so I don’t have the early December panic. It removes the need to remember from my brain, freeing up my mental load and decreasing my anxiety – and it’s even helped us save money in this cossie livs cri. We just use a shared Apple Notes list for it all and it’s been a huge game-changer.