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"Unf*ck Your Habitat:" The F-Bomb-Laden Approach to Cleaning House

You may not win the war on clutter, but Rachel Hoffman teaches you how to successfully execute battles

By Rain Noe - January 6, 2017

in Organization

It's always eye-opening to see how real people live, in contrast to the clutter-free staging of a design magazine apartment spread. It's also interesting to see that before-and-after photos of someone's home being cleaned…don't always look very different.

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Unfuck Your Habitat is a Tumblr started by Rachel Hoffman, whose no-nonsense, piecemeal approach to cleaning house is refreshingly honest. If Japanese decluttering expert Marie Kondo is a General laying out long-term strategy, Hoffman is Special Forces, getting in-and-out to pull small, quiet, quick-'n-dirty jobs as needed. To that end, her Tumblr features submitted photos of folks' before-and-afters of minor cleaning jobs in the service of, well, unfucking things.

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Hoffman's central tenet is that most of us are simply too busy to clean house. "Our lives are complicated and sometimes messy, and we're often distracted and overwhelmed and lazy," she writes. But the larger idea is that if we do a little at a time, using methods like her 20/10s—that's 20 minutes of cleaning, 10 minutes of fucking off—we can at least start to make a dent.

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The important thing to remember is that there is nothing that can't be unfucked. You just have to do it. You just have to overcome the compulsion to sit on the couch, on the computer, watching TV, and get up and do SOMETHING. Anything.

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Hoffman's cluttering-attacking philosophies, which are loaded up with more "fucks" than a Bill Burr set, has landed her a book deal; "Unf*ck Your Habitat: You're Better Than Your Mess" just came out this week. Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing has a review of it here.

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Jason Pokines

7 years ago

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I won't knock the advice: we could probably all afford to spend a little more time focusing on cleaning things up. However, am I alone in my feeling that the after images are just as cluttered and stress-inducing as the before images?

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- John Davies
  
  Jason Pokines
  
  7 years ago
  
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  1Z
  
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  No, I thought the same thing.
  
  Having just moved house after 23 years of living in the same place I can safely say that you can dump at least 50% of the crap that you own and not miss any of it!
  
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- Louis Costa
  
  Jason Pokines
  
  7 years ago
  
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  I agree, but also after a few minutes of browsing the site I decided I could clean my room for a change and found myself doing 2 hours of cleaning and re-arranging out of 'hey this could go here now, that could go there now, I'm going to dust this, put these things in a shoebox and put it somewhere new' - normally, my night would have just gone to waste browsing the internet so it actually helped me think it through first and then take the action I needed to
  
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Hui Mao

7 years ago

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Decluttering has bothered me for a while too. That's my intention to design this gadget called Foldist on kickstarter :)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inventeer/foldist-the-spine-of-your-clothing/

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