Spring Cleaning Brings the Rule of Fives

Well, hello friends. Good morning. Happy Monday to you. I hope everybody has been having a good spring here in Oklahoma. Weather is all over the place. We've had temperatures in the eighties. We've had temperatures in the forties. We've had sunny days. We've had rainy days and spring that spring in Oklahoma. So you can't base your plans around what the weather looks like. You just got to do what you're going to do. Today's Monday and I've got things to do. So I'm not even looking at the weather. I'm just going to do them. Uh, but some of the things I need to do are in this room in my home office, as I sit here sipping, see if you can hear the echo. If you are listening to the audio version, I'm talking into my coffee mug. And, uh, if you're not, I'd like to know how people are consuming this. Uh, I've heard from one, one person, uh, who said they're listening to these or reading these. Um, this is a bit of a, uh, a unique platform. It's very one way it's not, there are no, uh, maybe they'll develop it further. Maybe voice notes will add some features in the future, but right now it's very one way. It is similar to writing your manifesto, making copies of them, throwing them around town and not leaving, not having any way to leave a return address or email address or phone number. So you don't, don't really know if everybody read them, maybe everybody in town reads them. Maybe they all got swept up and throw it away. Who knows? Anyway, uh, this morning I want to talk to you about something that I have learned from my wife. This is something that my wife has said to me and done for as long as I've known her. This year, my wife and I will have been married for 30 years. And also last year returned 50. So we have spent more than half of our lives together. 30 of our 50 years we have spent together. Actually more than that. We moved in a couple of years before we got married. So we've, we've been together for a long time. And there's a thing that she does when things in the house get overwhelming, when laundry becomes too much to handle all in one, uh, you know, in one trip or the dishes or whatever, whatever needs to be done. And especially when a house starts feeling cluttered, which is usually due to things I've done. She has this thing she does called the rule of fives. And her, uh, I asked her about this. I asked her where this came from. And she said, she has no idea. She said she must've read it, uh, when she was young, but she's done it since the age of 20 for as long as I've known her. So if she read it, she read it a long time ago. Uh, but the rule of fives is a very simple concept and that is, uh, you could do five things. So if you walk into a room, uh, and the room is a disaster, you don't have to clean the entire room. You don't have to solve all the problems. Uh, you can pick up five things. If you walk into your bedroom and there's laundry everywhere, you can pick up five things. You can find five different things, pick them up and put them in the hamper. I told my wife, you know what, if you could do five, you could do 10, you know, just do five things, but what she'll do when the house starts getting cluttered is she will apply the rule of fives to every room she enters. So when she goes into the kitchen, she'll do five things. When she goes into the dining room, she'll do five things. When she goes into the living room, she'll do five things. But it's, it's a slow approach, uh, to, uh, really what it is, is breaking down large tasks into small, manageable tasks. If this, uh, were a video, this is where I would insert B roll and I would pan across my desk if I reach my right hand out right now, there's a pair of reading glasses, there's a spare set of keys. There's my regular car keys. There's a knife that I use to open an Amazon box. There's some sunglasses. Uh, there's a USB cable rolled up. There's a pair of earbuds in their chargers. None of those things are where they should be. But as I move further down the desk on one side, there's a tablet that's charging over here is my GoPro. Yeah. I just pulled some video off them. There's some cassette tapes that I'm going to.to put it into the computer someday, but not today. There's a belt I bought off of Amazon, so on and so forth. There are probably 50 things sitting here on my desk. It's now, I'm at the point this morning when I came in with my coffee, I had to scoot something aside to find a place to put my coffee mug. So it is time for me to implement the rule of fives. And I mentioned, right before I hit record on this, I asked my wife, hey, where did you learn the rule of fives from? And she said, I don't know. That's when we had that conversation. But she said that's so funny because in our closet, a lot of her clothes, either things that don't fit or things that used to fit or maybe things that are gonna fit someday, you know that category of clothes, have kind of ended up in the floor. They're kind of in a pile in the corner of the floor. And the pile is growing out like a slow mudslide. It's starting to grow and slide out. And she said when she went to the closet this morning to get a shirt to put on, she said, you know what? I could pick up five things. I could pick up five things, put them on hangers or put them where they need to go, but I could do five things. So when I went and asked her about the rule of fives, she said, did you hear me talking about it? And I said, no, what are you talking about? And so we have both kind of, maybe it's something that we're so used to now that when you see things laying around it, you just kind of kick into that mode. So I'll add one tiny bit onto the end of this. And I could probably talk about this tomorrow in a separate note. Maybe I will go into more detail, but I did a similar thing several years ago, about 10 years ago. And I made up a new game and it was called 365 Things. And the point of that game was to find one thing every day and get rid of it. Now, a lot of those type of things, people go, I could do that. I could throw away a paperclip every day. I could throw away thumbtacks, extra thumbtacks I have in my desk drawer. And you can, that's kind of circumventing the rules. And the other thing is you tend to run out of those things pretty quickly. I mean, I know what you're saying. You're thinking, well, if I have a hundred paperclips, but that's not really the goal of the project. But I would come into my room and I would look and I would scan my desk or scan the floor or scan a shelf or when I was in the closet doing something. And I would always have that in the back of my mind, thinking today I've got to get rid of one thing. And sometimes it was really easy. Sometimes I would find something that was broken or something and I'd go, ah, this is something I can get rid of. Like I'm cheating the system, I'm winning. But really I was winning, but not in the way that I thought. I wasn't winning because I was winning this game that I had made up for myself. I was winning because I just got rid of something that was broken, that was tying up shelf space, you know? So that was kind of the point of that game. Now, what happened to that game? I said I was going to save this for tomorrow, but I'll just tell you now, I guess. What happened to that was I got mired down in the minutia that went with that game. Now, if I had just got rid of things, and by the way, when I say get rid of them, I meant get them out of the house. So some of those things went into the trash, but some of them went into a donate bin that we took to Goodwill or some other thrift store and we donated those items. And sometimes we gifted them to people or whatever. But I, as a list maker and a documenter, I couldn't just let them go. So I would say, here's the item that I'm going to get rid of today, and then I would take a picture of it and I would put it on a spreadsheet and I would try to keep track of all these things, you know? And that, or I would say, you know what? I don't need this, but I'm going to sell it. Well, then it didn't really go away. It just went into a different pile of things that I'm going to sell someday. So I kind of got caught up in my own trappings. And so I only made it about a month on that. I mean, it's probably something I should probably start doing again, you know? But yeah, the rule of fives is a easy rule. Back to the rule of fives, it's an easy system. And so as I look around this room today, I mean, I could do the rule of five hundreds. You know, there's so many things to do in here. There's so many, oh, projects and things that need to be organized and things that need to be taken out, things that need to be brought in. You know, it's just a never ending thing with me and stuff. I've got a bad relationship with stuff. But I'm betting that I could easily find five things, pick up five things, you know? As I look.right now there are three pairs of shoes in the ground if I if I count them as individual shoes that's six things right there but you know if I pick up three pairs of shoes and something a couple other things that'll get me to the rule of fives until I come back in this room and then it starts over all over again so hey if you got something big in your life that you're trying to tackle whether it's a you know some kind of project a cleaning project organization whatever it is break it down into like five little things find five things you can spend five minutes working on it you'll get that and then you can just put that in the back you know you feel like you've accomplished something you move forward a little bit on the project you can work on something else and later do five more things on it so if you are listening to these I'd love to hear from you send me an email to Rob O'Hara that's r-o-b-o-h-a-r-a just like the the voice notes link Rob O'Hara at Rob O'Hara dot com and let me know what you think if you use voice notes I'd love to know how you're using it again this is I don't I get nothing if you use it or don't use it but I I've been using it you know and this is forcing me to use it more now I'm getting more used to using it every day and seeing the app and I'm finding other uses for it you know so anyway hope you have a great Monday and a great week and I will set a reminder and I'll talk to you tomorrow