I've been using the FlyLady stuff that makes sense for me, and ignoring the rest, as well as rolling my eyes at the perkiness. But it's really helpful to me to have things broken down into steps and small tasks. Like, today's task is to pick up all the jackets and shoes and stuff that collect by the front door and put them where they belong. Which I know needs to be done, but so do a million other things, and I would have gotten bogged down in trying to decide which thing to do first and ended up doing nothing.

Me, too. My main solution has been to put dishes away whenever I'm microwaving something. Of course, that's during the brief periods when the dishwasher is working.

That's exactly what I do. When I microwave or am making coffee I load and unload or clear crap off the counter. It helps things not get too far out of hand.

So I decided to sign up for flylady e-mails last night just to see if it would be helpful to me, and since then I have gotten 7 emails from the website. Is this a normal day with flylady or is this just a lot of introductory stuff all at once? Because honestly, I find 7 e-mails in 24 hours from the same website more annoying than helpful.

sj, that's one of the reason I unsubbed, besides the too fucking cheerful about cleaning -- too many damn emails.

If you switch to digest, is it better?

yes, switch it to digest. I did that and I think I get an email a week.

However, in direct opposition to flylady style: I do not read the email messages.

Yeah, I use the digest thing and get one email a day.

How are you guys getting one e-mail a week? I must have selected "every day" for the digest -- it's just one long e-mail a day (the individual e-mails are broken up with headers, etc; it's not just an unrelenting wall of text). Individual e-mails would be too overwhelming for me.

I skim over about 60% of the messages most days.

t edit But one digest e-mail per day is fine for me; I read it over coffee in the morning.

I heat up canned cat food over hot water (no microwave) in the mornings and evenings, set a timer for seven minutes, and empty the drain board and do dishes. I still have to do another 10-15 minutes of dishes, but it's helpful to tie it into something I have to wait on.

Puppy boy was hella late (2 hrs) and so I wrote him up. Sorry you're having a suck day; set an alarm on your phone.

Y'all have me terrified of the FlyLady. I am afraid she'd just make me feel guilty and awful on top of my inability to keep everything clean.

Actually, she's been the opposite of guilt-making for me. She has all these little catchphrases like, it didn't get dirty in a day, it's not going to get clean in a day, that let me let go enough to say, okay, it'll get a little bit cleaner today, and screw the rest. But I realize I've drunk the koolaid on this one, so I may not be a reliable source.

I get the individual emails, which are indeed ridiculous in volume. But I have set up mail filters that pick out, for example, the daily mission. I filter out the product testimonials as much as possible. So then I only have a few each day that are relevant to me, and I read those, unless I'm needing some more motivation. And I delete them all regularly. Because Flylady told me to.