Web site seeks to fight clutter

Clutter. The FlyLady hates it. She has an entire Web site devoted to helping us all remove the clutter from our homes so we don't have to live like pack rats.

Her solution is to put your home on a diet. That might be simple in an igloo, but it's down right difficult in most of our homes.

We're not prepared to go through the junk mail, much less find time to pick up all that stuff hanging around in our children's rooms.

Still, with our house in need of a diet, I logged onto the anti-clutter guru's Web site in search of an answer. I was hoping I could just send our house to the gym for a workout while I lounged on the couch.

Unfortunately, the FlyLady doesn't work that way. She wants us to work through this together.

Only through the Internet can you find someone like Marla Cilley of Brevard, N.C., known to her cleanup fans as the FlyLady because she likes to fly fish.

She's no Martha Stewart. All those decorating ideas would just add to the clutter, something that Cilley attacks with the commitment of a drill sergeant.

The goal, she says, is to find peace. It's a message that rings true with the 100,000 devoted followers on her online mailing list.

Not since Mary Poppins showed us how fun it was to clean up our room and sing about it too have we had a task master like this.

The FlyLady says she wants to help people manage CHAOS, which she defines as "Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome."

Most of us know exactly what she's talking about. It's particularly true for parents.

When Becca and Bailey turn our living room into a play store or an impromptu pretend classroom full of American Girl dolls there is a tendency to get bogged down in the clutter.

The FlyLady wouldn't want that. She suggests shining the kitchen sink every day and cleaning up in lace-up shoes. She maintains you get more done in lace-up shoes although my wife, Joni, would disagree. Joni likes going barefoot around the house whether she's cleaning up or not.

Cilley has settled on simple cleaning routines such as the 27 Fling Boogie where you run through your home with a plastic bag and grab up 27 things you want to throw away. Or you spend five minutes cleaning up a particularly clutter-filled spot such as the junk drawer in the kitchen.

In our house, that could take more than five minutes. Some people only have a junk drawer in name. We truly have a junk drawer full of assorted pens, batteries and other items that don't have any other place to go. We haven't had the heart to throw it all away.

The FlyLady preaches the wisdom of the Weekly Home Blessing Hour, which is 60 minutes of intensive cleanup in which you spend no more than 10 minutes on each area.

To help "flybabies" keep to their tasks, she sends them daily e-mail reminders and testimonials from those whose lives she has saved from the clutter.

True to her conviction, the FlyLady understands that all those e-mails can resemble clutter too. She says she doesn't mind if people delete them.

Personally, this is all great advice. But in our rush-here-and-there lives, we don't often have time to commune with our clutter, much less clean it up.

Still, it's nice to know there's someone on the Internet who understands our clutter consternation even if she is a little possessive about the kitchen sink.

Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.