I tried the one-touch rule to organise my home. Here's what happened
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Even where minimalism is verging on neurosis, clutter is often not the problem. It’s tidiness, that plain, old-fashioned habit of putting things back where they belong. After an avalanche of luggage knocked my glasses smartly off my face and almost crushed my oldest JRT (she can’t corner as she used to), I had to face the fact that me and mine were covert domestic slobs. We were shovelling the couldn’t-be-bothered behind cupboard doors, postponing the pain of dealing with that dratted sheaf of envelopes — the ripped throw, that pile of books for St Vincent de Paul.
The place is Spartan already. I appear to have been robbed. There was nothing on show not performing a practical role and/or that didn’t have a strong emotional pull and yet, I was failing in maintaining the well-ordered environment I wanted. At the end of most days, detritus and undone tiny jobs were littered around my rooms and more disturbingly, snowballing in my head.
Have you heard of the one-touch rule? Used everywhere from hotels to homes, cooperate offices to cruise-ship kitchens if you can summon the discipline it's been a game-changer.
Brought to light by Ann Gomez, a productivity consultant and the founding president of Toronto-based organisation Clear Concept Inc, one-touch thinking is an ancient practice.
It involves staying in the moment and dealing with smaller repetitive tasks in one continuous arc. If you come in the door and remove your coat, you put it on a hanger and off you go. If you need a bag for work at 7.30am the next day, it’s placed in position on its return from the outside world. If you pick up a letter from the mat or see an email that requires a response, you sit down and write or tap it out, firing a torn envelope right into the recycling.
As housekeepers, we cannot escape the exhaustion of being multitaskers, and women are routinely feted as superior to men in this department. However, in many cases we get so busy completing yesterday’s ridiculous little jobs, that we park only partially completed, we fudge what’s in front of us. It's procrastination over minute motions.
Down the line, these collide with our productivity and comfort. Imagine this as using a domestic credit card in a really sloppy way. It’s quick, convenient, and mindless, but the interest rate accumulates and builds into a bill we cannot easily pay. If you find yourself saying “I’ll deal with that later”, you’re probably in need of one-touch.
So, how do we get started with this life-altering new practice? Start small and instil some calm in what you’re doing. Centred breathing brings me right back to the now, as my chore skipping generally rides in on a ripple of anxiety about some past or future happening misting my mind. The one-touch rule is a good way to get through editing down domestic ballast in the course of a declutter too.
Like flexing a lesser-used muscle, the more you do it, the easier and more natural it will become, finally reading as effortless. Think of it as getting into the now, even while keeping your place straight.
Begin with that coat you’re throwing on the hall table or putting your shopping bags back in the car boot after you’ve done the Ben Hur chariot run and unloaded from the supermarket. Notice the little undone things that accumulate and give you a little spark of stress, depleting your mental energy. Be more aware of when this sly putting-off happens over an ordinary day. Laugh, forgive yourself, and commit to cleaning up your act.
The laundry is one area where the system so easily breaks down. When the drying is dry and you have the time to, fold and put it away right into drawers. It’s one-touch, not two to three happenings.
Life happens, and in the midst of doing something even relatively important — scraped knees, phones to answer and other slings and arrows of family life must take priority. One-touch is so positive because you can start right now. You make yourself tea, you go to leave the tea bag in the sink. You pause, think one touch, take out an unused canister and make it your new tea-bag recycling tin. Done.
The chore of taking that tea bag to the recycling, and cleaning that blot off the stainless steel no longer exists. With kids try simply asking them to think about putting things away where they should go rather than putting them down. I found the three-minute toy tidy challenge with music and coloured baskets a real winner when Faelen was small. If things needed carrying upstairs, we had a basket for three to five items. It works well without flying upstairs for every sock or single item from the shopping.
One-touch makes the most sense when you carry out a task in one allotted time. It could be 30 seconds, it could be an hour. Don’t plan tasks that take time and concentration into slivers of your day. This could be washing windows, cleaning out a base cupboard or setting out a meal plan. It’s better to schedule them further down the road into logical generous periods when you know you can make a beginning and end of the job in one clean motion with uninterrupted focus.
Once committed to doing something, don’t allow other distractions, intersecting chores, or “while I’m here” to knock you off your primary plan – stay on task. Schedule those things for when you have time.
Decluttering is often a major chore, and you can stop the drip of additional stuff drowning your good intentions by starting one-touch behaviours immediately. If you put your hand on something, avoid putting your hand on it again. Follow through.
When it comes to organising a serious mess, plan what you’re hoping to achieve and be more decisive. Pick it up, analyse if it has a place in your life, and if not put it straight into the box that’s going out the door to a charity shop, to the dump or on its way to a new home.
Don’t dither or make up a "maybe" box. Don’t take the boxes to a quiet place of forgetfulness like the garage. Try somewhere deliberately annoying like the back seat of the car rather than the boot. It’s important to have a place for everything, but don’t automatically introduce more storage to solve a storage issue. I do like to micro-manage as it puts very clear parameters on where my things are going once in the air.
I have to finish here with a book gifted to me by a friend. The outrageous title (including the author’s name) made me laugh out loud before I slid it neatly onto my shelves for an evening revelation — (€16, Skyhorse Publishing).
I’ll have to rely on an asterisk-heavy promo to describe the work organisational savant and devoted swearer Messie Condo (surely a pseudonym), but I couldn’t sum up this roll-on-the-floor guide better: “Like a delightfully foul-mouthed best friend, this book dishes out the funny, unpretentious advice you need to hear most. You’ll discover how to deal with your sh*t like there’s no tomorrow, live in the moment without the f**king mess, and make your life and your eventual death a hell of a lot easier. Learn how to: ditch the d*mn indecision, get your sh*t together and feel fantastic and more!” It’s Swedish Death Cleaning with the quaint, polite framing stuffed into the black bin. It was hilarious and confronting.