Learning New Habits Now For Later

I was recently asked how I keep my house so clean with a baby. I didn’t know how to respond at the moment, but after thinking about it, I realized that it was all the effort I put into learning new habits before baby was born that are helping me to stay afloat now.

How To Get Into New Habits

Getting into the swing of a new habit is often the hardest part. Picking a single task and making it your Monday resolution is, in my opinion, the easiest way to start. Only trying to do one thing at a time will help keep new things from becoming overwhelming.

Tidying Up

What originally gave me the idea to start building habits now for the future was cleaning up when I was done. When I was living alone, it wasn’t a big deal to leave my computer and current crochet project out on the living room floor at the end of the day. Why not? I was going to get them back out tomorrow anyway. But I started thinking about how it would look if my husband did the same thing. Then a couple children started doing so.

It struck me that I would most likely be having to clean up their messes, at least for a little while, and didn’t want to have to contend with my own as well.

Touch Once

Getting into the habit of only touching an item once is helpful when trying to keep a tidy home. Instead of moving items from one pile to another when cleaning up, put them where they go the first time.

A big way this habit comes into play is when you get home from work. Instead of getting home and dropping all you stuff at the door to be either gone back to later or forgotten about, put things away as you go. 

For me this looks like, walking inside and hanging up my cover and keys, and taking off my boots. Then I walk into the kitchen to empty out my lunch box and put it away. After that I move onto the bedroom where I take off my uniform. Now everything is where it needs to be. I am ready to carry on with my day instead of having to go back and pick up various items throughout the house.

Wash, Dry, Put Away 

Nothing is worse than getting to the end of the day and having a full sink of dishes to wash. I personally don’t even enjoy the visual clutter of a full sink.

Unfortunately, I can not remember where I first heard this mantra to properly give credit where it is due. A piece of advice that has helped me to form an easy yet impactful habit is to wash, dry, and put away your dishes as soon as you are done eating. This has been an incredibly helpful habit to start. It feels so much easier to wash one plate and fork as you go through the day than to have to wash three all at once. Usually it is necessary to rinse a dish anyway, it is not that much more work to wipe it with a soapy rag and be done.

Kitchen Skills

There are so many skills in the kitchen that are so helpful to know and can save you a lot of money in the long run. Many of the thing I now know how to make, I wanted to learn so I can feed my family and help them to live healthier lives. I started learning before I ever thought of having children, but it is never too late to start!

The key is to start with one thing, and get into a good routine of making it. Once it becomes second nature, add another. Remember that no one learned how to do everything over night. For ideas on where to start, check out my post on the easiest foods to start making from scratch here.

I hope my advice on starting new habits to help your future self are helpful to you and you are able to build lasting habits that help you stay afloat in the busy seasons. If there are any habits that you have that you feel really help you to stay on top of things, please share in a comment. I would love to hear them.