33: Progress vs Maintenace
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Welcome to episode 33 of Permission to be Messy. I'm your host, JoAnn Krall and today I'm talking about progress versus maintenance. This is a concept I have brought up several times. it's something I've been teaching for a very long time, but it was brought to my attention that some people didn't think of. what I think of progress and maintenance. They were thinking that it was all maintenance.
And it's a valid point. . When I talk about maintenance in my program , I'm typically talking about cleaning. And when I'm talking about progress, I'm talking about decluttering. The person said, but isn't, but you're saying you should declutter all the time. So it isn't that maintenance. It is. And really these words, you can use, whatever words you want. In fact, you could use decluttering and cleaning as your words. I have always used progress versus maintenance. So when we're maintaining things, we're doing what we need to do. The things that are always going to be there. Now we could assume that the clutter is not always going to be there, but there's always going to be the dirt. So that's why I use the word maintenance for cleaning, because we're always going to have , dishes we're always going to have to clean our bathrooms. And I read something, somebody said maintenance are tasks that allow you to survive. I guess you could think of it that way, but I think we could all survive even if we had a little bit of dirt in our homes. So I thought that was a little bit extreme. And then, they were talking about progress moving closer to your goals, which I agree. When I'm helping people get organized decluttering is a goal. Getting to the point where you have the least amount of clutter and when you're there, of course, when you move on, Decluttering does move into maintenance mode. But again, the words aren't important, it's really just the concepts to make sure that you're doing a balance.
Because often, when we're overwhelmed and we have a lot going on, sometimes we're doing neither. We're not cleaning or decluttering. But other times, we're just doing the bare minimum of cleaning, which is fine. And, we're not decluttering at all, or sometimes we're decluttering, but we're not doing any of the cleaning and we still don't feel like we're getting ahead. Don't worry about the semantics of the words when I use that progress versus maintenance. If it resonates with you awesome. If it doesn't. Find other words I really think the important thing is to make sure that you're doing something each day that moves you forward.
And maybe you don't even have words for this whole process. Maybe it's just, this is something that I have to get done. It's a mundane task and I have to do it. And then this thing over here is something that I know is going to move me towards my goals. You can think of progress as having deadlines. Maintenance is just ongoing, regardless of what it is. There's so many different ways to look at this. And there's no right or wrong. So when I'm helping people, learn this concept, I have them doing progress and maintenance daily. But that isn't a hard and fast rule. If it is more helpful to you to spend an entire day on maintenance things. They're easy sometimes, and they don't require a lot of thought. They may be physical depending on what you're doing. But there's something that we routinely do over and over. So I think it'd be a little bit easier. And then the next day you do some progress. That's okay too. I think it's just important to be aware that you're not just doing busy work.
So follow how you feel. And let that be your guide. it doesn't have to be, you're doing one thing each day. That is how I help people understand the concept. And it does work for some people, but you have to be flexible. And give yourself grace. One thing I'll leave you with today, though, is If you do find yourself not making any progress or moving forward towards your goals. Try and set aside. Maybe an hour a day to work on something that's important to you or that will move you forward. Whatever that is in, in, if it's, if your goal is to get organized and you've, maybe you've already decluttered fully, maybe it's now researching or doing the evaluation and figuring out. what systems are going to work for you going forward. Because once we've gotten to that point, then we're in maintenance mode.
So I would love to hear from you. What are your thoughts on progress versus maintenance? My contact information is in the show notes.
And as always I'm wishing you much Progress, Peace, Purpose and the permission to be messy. Thanks for listening.
