How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind - Review

How to Manage Your Life Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House's Dirty Little Secrets

By: Dana K White

Publication: November 8th 2016 by Thomas Nelson

240 pages

Genre: Non-fiction, Self-Help

Source: Personal Kindle Library

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Goodreads description--Bring your home out of the mess it’s in and learn how to keep it under control.

“The dirty little secret about most organizing advice is that it’s written by organized people,” says blogger, speaker, and decluttering expert Dana K. White. “But that’s not how my brain works. I’m lost on page three.” Dana blogs at A Slob Comes Clean, chronicling her successes and failures with her self-described “deslobification process.” In the beginning she used the name “Nony” (short for aNONYmous), because she was sharing her deep, dark, slob secret. Now she has truly come clean—with not only her real name but the strategies she has developed, tested, and proved in her own home. She has learned what it takes to bring a home out of Disaster Status, which habits make the biggest and most lasting impact, and how to keep clutter under control.

In How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind, Dana explains that cleaning your house is not a onetime project but a series of ongoing premade decisions. Her reality-based cleaning and organizing techniques debunk the biggest housekeeping fantasies and help readers learn what really works. Chapter titles include

My First Step: Giving Up on the Fantasy
The Worst Thing About the Best Way
Just Tell Me What to Do
Conquering Laundry
Get Dinner on the Table
Putting an End to the Never-Ending Weekly Cleaning Tasks
Don’t Get Organized
How to Declutter Without Making a Bigger Mess
Fighting the Perceived Value Battle
But Will It Last?

With a huge helping of empathy and humor, Dana provides a step-by-step process with strategies for getting rid of enormous amounts of stuff in as little time (and with as little emotional drama) as possible.

I first found Dana K White through her YouTube channel. Then I got her book Decluttering at the Speed of Life when the audiobook went on sale. And then I got How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind when the Kindle version went on sale. Technically, HtMYHWoLYM published first so that tidbit will come in handy later in this review.

This book really comes down to three sections. There is the first section dedicated to the daily tasks you need to work into your day in order to keep your home manageable. The second section is dedicated to decluttering. And then the third section (in the version I have) is an appendix of 28 days to implement the tasks discussed in section 1 so that they become habits.

The first section was what I took the most away from in this book. I have always hated cleaning but I very much enjoy having a clean home. Before our home renovation project began I'd gotten into the habit of two of these tasks already. And thankfully I've been able to maintain them while we've been living with my parents so I don't think they will be hard to resume once we are back in our house.

The second section felt like a repeat too me of Decluttering at the Speed of Life. That is simply because of the order that I read these books. I suppose Dana K White wrote that section in this book and then realized that decluttering could be an entire book all it's own. I didn't mind the repeat personally because I need all of the reminders of the process and the benefits that I can get.

I'm not sure the third section will be very beneficial for me or not. If I were home or if I needed to start from scratch on these habits then maybe so. But maybe I'll jump in the middle of the 28 days when we get back home to finish developing the daily habits that I need to.

Regardless, I feel like I got a lot out of How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind. I might have preferred to listen to the audiobook version of this if Dana had narrated it like she did the other, but having the Kindle version will be easier for reference. I look forward to being able to fully implement the ideas from this book once we get back home. How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind gets 4.5 Stars. Have you read How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind? What did you think? Let me know!