When You Think of Your House Like a Machine
More efficient machine = more time to do what you actually want to do
Welcome to the final edition in Culture Study’s Cleaning Week! Today, I’m talking with about a very different approach to home organization: one that focuses on 1) taking a systems approach to getting your shit in order and 2) getting that shit in order in a way that aligns with *your* values — not some Instagram standard (or your mom’s). You can subscribe to Rebecca’s newsletter below.
As for the rest of Cleaning Week: You can find the first entry (on the moral valence of cleaning) here — and the second entry (unpacking our individual “cleaning stories”) here, and the third entry (on how we’ve figured out things in our house + other ways my thinking on cleanliness has changed since 2019) here. Oh, and we have a bonus Garden Study on WEEDS ARE NOT A MORAL FAILING and garden “cleanliness,” if that’s your thing.
On Friday, we had a sprawling thread of practical tips — because even when you spend a lot of time interrogating cleaning norms (as we have done, at length, over the course of the week) sometimes you still just need a little bit of help (we still have not solved my high ceiling fan problem, but we’ve solved a lot of others)
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Finally, thank you to every one of you who made this week so compelling — your introspection and kindness has made this week a success. This was a LOT of content for one week, and I’m doing a bunch of shopping and my own organization for the four-week period when the car ferry to the island goes out of service….so no Wednesday post this coming week, but we’ll have threads as usual.
Now, on to Rebecca — on what it means to reject organization porn, how to identify “stocks and flows” in your home, and practical tips for people who live alone, people whose brains or bodies simply can’t do that much cleaning, people with small kids, and people with kids they want to include in the process.