221: Try This Hack if You Struggle with Maintenance and Your Home Keeps Getting Messy

Bail and Build: Why “Just Maintain It” Was Never Realistic Advice

You’ve worked hard on a space. It’s decluttered, organized, genuinely beautiful. You blink, and somehow it’s just as messy as before, maybe worse. The monkey brains in your life say something like, well, it just takes routine consistent maintenance, as if you don’t already know that. Except your brain hates routine, consistency is basically kryptonite, and the word “maintenance” doesn’t give you the same dopamine hit that a dramatic before-and-after does. So are we doomed to a cycle of temporary niceness that always blows back up in our face?

The boat full of holes

I’ve used this analogy before, but it bears repeating, maybe in a slightly different light this time. Picture your life, particularly your home, as a boat full of holes, taking on water at whatever pace daily life happens to bring. Living is messy. Living isn’t a museum or a curated social media snapshot. Every joke about how you could have a spotless house if you just got rid of your kids and dog is really just a way of saying life happens, we have to embrace it. But if you feel like you’re the person who will never climb out from under a sinking boat, like it’s taking on more water than you can ever keep up with, that feeling deserves a real answer, not just “embrace the mess.”

My mantra for the year: bail and build

Bailing is the ongoing, unglamorous work of just getting water out of the boat, over and over. It rarely looks like it’s moving the needle, but if you stopped bailing entirely, things would get dramatically worse very fast. Every bit of bailing is useful, even when it feels invisible.

Building is different: it’s not building a new boat, it’s plugging one of the holes so that same water stops coming back in at all. That might mean permanently eliminating something from your life, setting up a system so a recurring task stops being the hardest, most time-consuming version of itself, or building real structure around whatever you find yourself bailing out constantly.

The 25-a-day hack

Here’s the actual tool I’ve been using for five days now, and it’s working well enough that I catch myself gaming the system to hit the number. Open the notes app on your phone and title a new note “25” plus the date. Then, throughout the day, list anything at all that counts as bailing the boat. Everything counts: got up, brushed your teeth, got dressed, made the bed, made lunches, got the kids out the door, emptied the dishwasher, filled the dishwasher, wiped a counter, took out the trash, started a laundry load, switched it when the buzzer went off, folded it, put it away, picked toys off the floor, gathered errands into the car, dusted something, vacuumed a room. All of it counts toward 25, in whatever order you happen to do it in.

Here’s where it gets more interesting: at the end of the day, look back over your list and ask which of those items were actually a build rather than just a bail. Did you do a regular activity tied to one of your yearly goals (went to yoga, read a chapter of that book, sent the email about a podcast guest)? Anything that’s a genuine step forward, rather than just keeping water out, gets highlighted in a different color. I use blue for build, because apparently I really do love alliteration. Once you start doing this, you begin to notice that you’re not only bailing constantly, you’re also quietly building toward things you’d assumed you never had time for.

When you’re short at the end of the day

If evening rolls around and you’re sitting at 18 instead of 25, that’s when the fun part kicks in: what small thing can you still knock out to stack a few more bails onto the list before bed? Clear the table. Load the dishwasher and start it. Straighten the couch pillows. It becomes its own small game of closing the day out strong.

Give yourself permission to write down anything at first, even things like “got up,” just to build momentum. Over time you’ll naturally get more discerning, maybe you stop counting the things you always do anyway and start holding the bar a little higher for the tasks you tend to drag your feet on.

Your practical, actionable step

Open your notes app right now, label it with today’s date, and start listing anything you’ve already done today that counts as bailing the boat. Aim for 25, and at the end of the day, go back and highlight anything that was actually a build toward one of your real goals.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.