18 Time-Saving Tips For Messy, Scattered, Disorganized, Creative Parents

Maybe you’re like me: a creative who would much rather dive into their imagination than clean the damn house. Like many creatives, I have an ADHD brain, which helps me as a novelist, but interferes with having one of those perfect homes you see on Instagram. I do love those perfectly tidy and clean homes and I would really love to be totally on top of every single area of my life, but sadly, nope. The ADHD gift of hyper focus means I can write for eight hours without stopping, but it can be a real obstacle to staying organized with things like laundry, cleaning, meals, meetings, pick-ups, forms, and schedules. Parenting is hard enough but the organizing around parenting can sometimes feel impossible.

If chaos doesn’t bug you, great, carry on! I personally dislike the problems that go along with having my kind of brain: running around the house searching for keys, panicking because I forgot to put a meeting on a calendar or procrastinating cleaning the kitchen disaster after dinner.

Over the years, my orderly friends and family have given me logical suggestions, such as, put your keys in the same place every time. It’s a good one, but it only works if you weren’t daydreaming as you walked in the door. If you were daydreaming, those keys could be anywhere: the bathroom floor, the closet, or in the fridge next to the salami, which you were snacking on.

I know I’m not alone. The problem of the creative messy household plagues many of my most successful artist and writer friends. Some have piles of papers years old or they haven’t unpacked boxes from six years before or their kids still have clothes filling their closet that haven’t fit them in years.

I’m not talking about a hoarding issue, which is a serious mental health issue, but rather a messiness or disorganization issue which makes you feel like you’re just barely treading water, keeping your head up, hoping you don’t look like a disorganized fool. If this sounds like you, I did some research, interviewed other creatives for their tricks, worked on my own executive functioning skills and found some out-of-the-box solutions.

I learned that other creatives had special tricks that I did not have while I was doing my MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I was surrounded by other novelists who were also parents with real responsibilities. I was sitting in the Neci cafeteria, sipping on some carrot soup, talking to some other writer parents about the sheer volume of household and kid-related work, on top of teaching, writing a novel, and doing everything I needed for the MFA. I cried: all that folding!

The other writers stared at me — oh no, they said, “We don’t fold.”

“What?”

“I use the bin method,” one of them told me.

They looked at each other and nodded — same. I was, like, the bin method??

They explained the bin method helped them save time so they could write more. Once I tried it back at home, I wanted to find out what other things creatives did to save time. I did the research and I followed through.

Our house is now quite orderly. I have no piles of papers. Everything is filed. I rarely miss meetings or forget to sign forms. Chaos does occasionally climb into our lives like an old friend, but it’s now a temporary visitor.

I’m sure you have your own quickie methods, but here are some tricks fellow creatives have shared, including the bin method. I hope they’ll help you. Feel free to let me know your tricks in the comments.

1. The Bin Method. This is the opposite of the Marie Kondo method of folding, which is total bullcrap for those of us with creative kids. A hundred hours of folding time all destroyed in one minute? No thanks. For the Bin Method, kids have a clean, clear bin in their closet. After you or they wash their clothes, everything goes in their clean bin except for towels, which are fast to fold and go in the bathroom. The kids either fold their own or dig through their clean clothes in the bin rather than destroying your folding.
2. Laundry. By the age of ten, most kids can do their laundry. Give them a day. Same with your spouse. Do not do a grown person’s laundry.
3. Ironing. Do not iron.
4. One Load Before Bed. Put in one load of laundry in the washer each night before bed and one load in the dishwasher. Something about the machines working while you sleep is very rewarding.
5. The 15 Minute Clean. Anytime you don’t want to clean, tell yourself it’s just 15 minutes. Set a timer. You can do this for specific areas too, like closets. If you don’t know where to start, just get everything off the floor. It’s amazing how much better a house will look.
6. Organization Day. One day a week, (I do it on Sundays) you sort and pay the bills, set alarms on your phone for any meetings, look at the kids’ homework and forms, and list any things you need to do that week. This is also a good day for kids to get organized.
7. Baskets. Have a “mess” basket for each kid. You can throw their things in fast. At the end of the day, kids put their own things into the basket. This beats nagging them to pick up their stuff and makes a happier house.
8. Kids’ bedrooms. Let their rooms be messy all week. They clean it on the weekend.
9. Order groceries online. The amount of time, mental energy and stress that you save is worth the fee you pay. You’ll save money because you won’t make impulse buys.
10. The kids do the grocery shopping. If you don’t want to shop for groceries online, kids can do grocery shopping. Obviously, this depends on their age, but teens can easily shop from a grocery list and they often love it. You can write in the car while they shop.
11. A Standard Meal List. You only need to do this once. List every meal you like. Put the ingredients under it. Use the ingredient list as your grocery shopping list. Rotate this every two weeks. That way, you’ll always have the ingredients and you don’t have to do last minute trips to the store. If you get bored of something, switch it out.
12. Kids can cook meals for the whole family. Start with one easy meal per child each week. They plan it, give you the list of ingredients so you can buy them and they clean up after.
13. Fast meals. The crockpot is your friend. Clean while you cook.
14. Double cook your meals. Freeze one for later. Eat one.
15. Paper plates and paninis. Put out ingredients, the panini maker and paper plates. Everyone makes their own. Almost no clean-up.
16. Trading the Work. Try to do work trades with friends. When our kids were younger, we traded babysitting. I’ve also traded dog walking.
17. Labeling. Okay, I’ll admit, those organization shows are crack for me. All the pretty color organization! If only we could maintain that! However, one really useful tip is to buy a bunch of clear plastic bins of different sizes and label them. It’ll save you a ton of time searching for things. Your kids can do this too and label makers are fun for everyone.
18. Throwing and giving stuff away. Ugh, I know, I saved this one for last because I know so many of you are going to shake your heads and say no way. I’ve moved my family a gazillion times, including four times across the country from LA to NYC and back, so I’ve had to minimize our belongings. I do understand it’s hard to let things go. My artist friends often say that they might use their piles of things in some future artistic endeavor. However, I think the mess can get in the way of actually creating. Clearing out that mess will make a big difference in terms of being able to find things and it helps to think about it as an act of kindness for some other family. If you’re sentimental, take a picture.

Now, it’s your turn! Add in your own comments, fellow messy creatives. What one thing have you done that has made a big difference in making you feel in control and organized?