Introduction to Getting My House in Order

My problem is obvious, but the solution has been elusive.

I'm 57 years old, and I've been an inveterate slob for my entire adult life.

I'm not a lazy person, and in fact one of my problems is that my schedule for any given week is almost certain to be completely out of control. I'm also not self-delusional. While I can give the reason for any enormous pile of disarray I've generated (and there have been a few situations out of my control which have contributed to the general hole I'm in) the real reason for the fact that I'm buried in clutter and debris can be summed up in one phrase:

The cumulative effects of bad habits over time.

I've made many starts at getting things in order. The most successful tactic for me has been to invite someone over with about four weeks lead time. The day of the event the house will typically be in it's best shape of the year. The problem, of course, is that my bad maintenance habits cause the general slide into disarray to begin as soon as my visitors leave the house. Instead of being a foundation upon which to build the next phase of getting things in order, the house merely became a Potemkin village, destined to slide back into chaos due some some sort of swirling field of entropy surrounding my domestic life.

So, what do I do at this point? Is the cliche "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" really true?

I don't think so, and I'm setting up this blog as a progress report on my plan for getting my house in order.

I drew inspiration from two of the posts on the excellent blog Zen Habits.

The two posts are:

7 Little Habits that can Change Your Life and How to Form Them

and

13 Things to Avoid When Changing Habits

There are significant differences in my requirements and the recommendations of those two articles. The scale of work I have to do makes this more of a large scale project than a set of incremental habit corrections. But if I'm going to actually maintain the state of my house as I get each stage of the project finished, I'm going to have to build good habits one at a time.

I'll go into much more detail as the project progresses.