Hello FlyLady,

I only recently found you — someone in a Facebook group I’m part of shared a link to your site, and I decided to check it out. I’m so glad I did! I will admit, I am *really bad* at following directions, so I don’t often succeed in doing the day’s flight plan. But your message of “you can do anything for 15 minutes” has really stuck with me! Even if I do nothing else, I make sure to set a timer for 25 minutes and FLY through some cleaning and decluttering every day. I told my husband about you and the 15 minute cleaning sprint idea; he immediately said, “Okay, set a timer, and let’s get to work.” He actually kept cleaning after the 15 minutes were over because we were so close to having the kitchen back together.

We’re both pretty messy people, and neither of us were really taught how to create cleaning routines. And now with a baby, we have even more mess and more company! My husband isn’t the sort of person who usually sees something that needs to be done and just does it — his threshold for mess is higher than mine — but he willingly helps out if I ask. Recently (I’ve only been getting your emails for a week or two), he’s started taking more initiative! Last night, he got rid of some junk that was getting in the way of the washing machine and drier without my prompting. And if he sees me doing something that we decided was “his” chore, he tells me to put it down and do something else, and he hops right up and gets to work.

I don’t know if you’ve talked about this on your website, but before I found out about you, my husband and I had talked about having designated chores. I felt like the majority of the housework and parenting was falling on me, and I was being treated as “project manager” of the house — which is unfair to both of us. I told him that instead of me asking him to do something every day, I would like him to pick one chore, any chore, and that would now be his job at home. He could then pick whichever task he hated the least, and he could take ownership of it. We’re both still working on building these habits for our designated chores, but already it feels like we’re making progress on our CHAOTIC house and building up our relationship together.

Many thanks from FL!