Member-only story
How a Lifelong Messy Person Can Learn to Become Neat
Experts in habit formation are adamant that no one’s a hopeless case
It’s been a tradition of mine for years now: Every summer, my house has gone through a wild roller-coaster ride of a makeover, from total mess to sparkling and back again.
Most of the time, my living room looked like a keg party had gotten out of hand at the Apple store, every surface is strewn with pizza boxes, empty beverage cans, coffee-stained newspapers, and enough USB cables to charge a small, iPhone-wielding battalion. Summer meant weeks of staying in home exchanges and renting to Airbnb guests, and I’d clean the place top to bottom before departing. Reliably, though, soon after the season ended and we returned home for good, the mess would find its way back in.
But this past year, a strange thing happened: Months and months after our Airbnb guests departed, our house was still, against all odds… not that messy. Tidy, even. What madness was this?
If it hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t believe it. But it turns out that this transformation wasn’t quite as miraculous as I thought. According to home organizers and experts in habit formation, anyone can learn to be neat, even if they’ve spent a lifetime doing the opposite. Over the years, without even knowing it…
