Your living room and kitchen are the two busiest spots in most homes. If everything is organised in these two rooms you like it and feel comfortable. Unfortunately, life tends to get busy. We run in and out of our homes, leaving times scattered in our path. If we have other people sharing our living spaces we have this confusion multiplied. In the space of a few days, the kitchen and living room can look like a bomb has hit them (I speak from experience here).
What can you do? Let’s do a quick tidy-up.

A dog running towards the camera, tidy up?

The quick tidy-up technique

The technique goes by many names: crisis cleaning, room rescues, clutter buster or tidy-ups. Nowadays, I like to call it a tidy-up, when the kids were younger it was “crisis cleaning”, as I often felt like our house had reached a crisis point. This crisis cleaning is very easy. All you need is a timer and possibly a broom, bin, bag, etc.

Firstly pick the area you are going to target
Select the time you will spend on this (I would say anywhere between 5 - 15 minutes. Do not go more than 20 minutes for 1 space as you will burn yourself out).
Set the timer and gather all rubbish, all shoes, all laundry, all books (all items that you can somehow group together).
Put the items in their spot straight away (within the allotted time).
After your time is up, see your progress. Change to another area or room. Do not do two crisis cleaning sessions in one spot.

Don’t aim for perfection with a quick tidy-up

It is not perfect but it is a lot better. If you spend half an hour to an hour on this, your house will look so much better in a very short period. The only trick is that everything needs to have a "home". If you have a massive pile of papers and no allocated spot to keep them, you need to create a spot, otherwise, you will just move items rather than put them back in place. It sounds so easy but this was a major point for me. Before getting organised, I did not have "homes" for items. As a result, stuff would just "live" anywhere I had dropped them.

The ideal situation would be if we can do a tidy-up every day. However this is not always possible, some days we are in and out the door and too exhausted to do anything by the time we get home. I hope this crisis cleaning technique helps in those busy weeks when you need to get some order back into your life and you need it fast.