My Honest Review of the 2023 Flylady 101 Class
Last week I finished the very last day of the Flylady 101 Class on YouTube, and I want to tell you all about it.
As I mentioned before, when I first started the class, Flylady 101 is completely free. I must confess, I climbed into a serious Flylady warp zone in the past month, as I went all in on Flylady.
I took the class, read the book, downloaded the app, and I even signed up for the email list!
It is very rare for me to go whole hog like this, but after moving from a larger house to a smaller one, we are drowning in clutter. If you want someone to motivate you to deal with your clutter everyday, Flylady is the YouTube channel for you.
And this is absolutely not a sponsored post.
This is what I found most helpful about the Flylady 101 class:
-There is a video for each week day. The videos get progressively shorter until they are only about twenty minutes a piece. I watched the videos while I got ready in the morning. While I was getting dressed, brushing my teeth, and unloading the dishwasher, I am watching/listening to the Flylady class.
-Watching the video daily keeps motivation on your mind. This is not just about house cleaning. Marla (the Flylady) encourages you to get dressed everyday and take care of yourself. She is big on “getting dressed to shoes” before you leave your bedroom.
Honestly, I have coffee first, but I do wear my house shoes, so I have decided that counts. Old habits die hard.
The sad thing is after being home all day every day for eighteen years, I am one hundred percent the person who needs to be reminded to get up, get dressed to shoes, and develop some self worth.
I am the target audience for this series.
-Progress, Not Perfection
I adore this message of progress, not perfection. It speaks to my soul. We have a busy house, and I am not always an energetic person. Perfection is not happening here.
In the world of blogging and writing on line in general, perfection is the king of everything. If you want to share a recipe, you need a perfect picture. Want to talk about decluttering? You’d better have some Pinterest perfect matching containers that cost ten dollars a pop. Everything should look bathed in light, as if the containers descended down from heaven itself.
Bleh. Then the result of this culture of online perfection is that all of us regular people see it, feel smaller because we cannot replicate that, and give up. I do not find perfection particularly inspiring, but we have all come to expect it on the internet.
When you are online, you have pretend perfection on one side and filth on the other. It is a wonder we all bravely engage in the internet every day.
-Focus on one habit per month.
Flylady encourages us to focus on one habit per month, and I love that too. I focused on “swish and swipe” this month. “Swish and Swipe” is basically cleaning your bathroom up every single morning after you get ready.
With four people (three of whom are males) using our bathroom every morning, I can firmly report that this is unfortunately necessary.
I faithfully focused on daily swish and swipe for all of the past month, August 20ish until now, and it made an amazing difference. It doesn’t make me depressed to look at my bathroom anymore! Plus, company can use it without me feeling humiliated.
The Flylady also assigns a habit to each month, but you don’t have to choose that one. You adapt the program to what you need to work on. I think the habit for September is your before bed routine, but swish and swipe was what I needed to set in place the most.
-In each video, Flylady goes over a different principle of personal or home maintenance.
Downside to the Flylady program:
The only dislike I have is the copious amounts of emails. It does help to get emails to remind you to do the things, but there are just so many.
If you just watch the Flylady 101 class though, that does not sign you up fo the email list. No, I went to her website and did that to myself.
My other complaint is the amount of advertising for the Flylady cleaning supplies. I get it though. All of Flylady’s videos, classes, and resources are free, so selling supplies is how she pays her bills. That makes sense.
However, I will say that the Flylady cleaning tools are good supplies. I do have the rags, and they are in fact my best rags. They hold up well too.
My favorite Flylady tool:
The app is definitely my favorite Flylady tool, and it is free. It has checklists for morning, afternoon, and evening routines, as well as a weekly home blessing hour checklist. There are daily and weekly assignments in there too.
I have yet to do more than one of the weekly assignments in any given week because it has just been beyond me. This is about progress, not perfection after all. It is enough that I have finally mastered swish and swipe.
Y’all, my swish and swipe sharing a bathroom with three males is still gross. Boys’ toilets are not funny.
Coolest thing I learned from Flylady 101: How to clean windows!
I never knew how to clean windows. To tell the truth, I have never lived anywhere long enough for it to even matter much to me. However, cleaning windows, mirrors, and doors is on the weekly ten minute clean checklist, so I made a stab at it.
You don’t clean all of your windows and mirrors every week. You just spend ten minutes cleaning whichever ones you choose.
The first week I struggled hard with the screens and the windows. How can you possibly get to the window with that screen there?
The second week I discovered that the window has these buttons on the side that allow you to flip the window inside and clean it! Wow! It turns out that I have some nice windows.
What my family thinks:
Daniel thinks I’m obsessed with the Flylady.
The funniest part is that they all think she sounds exactly like Aunt Janet. The first time they heard the class, they all had to come into the kitchen to see if I was talking to Aunt Janet on the phone.
Another one of my favorite things about this program is that the Flylady is an advocate of not nagging your family. Yes, they should be taught to do chores and clean up after themselves. However, we create the tone for our home.
If we are always chewing people out for leaving a wrapper on the end table, all we cultivate is fear and bitterness.
Nagging is not my struggle, so I feel like this validates how I felt about this already. I’m not saying I never nag, but it is not my go-to state of being. In fact, sometimes when company is around I will bother the kids more than usual about neatness because I’m a people pleaser.
If you teach them patiently and promote a happy environment, people will more naturally want to declutter and clean up after themselves.
Flylady teaches us to not declutter anyone else’s things or nag them about doing so. Instead, focus on your house and your things, and they will naturally follow suit.
This has already happened with my youngest son! He called me into his bedroom a few days ago and asked, “Since you are an expert on closets, can you help me with mine? I cannot even close my closet doors.”
Oh my goodness. He called me an expert. Isn’t he so precious?
How could I resist that? We didn’t aim for perfection in one bedtime session in his room. Instead, I just focused on meeting his goal of being able to close his closet doors. We 27-fling-boogie’d his closet floor and put all the Legos back in the Lego drawers, and that took care of it.
The next day he cleaned off and re-organized his bookshelves. Then the next day, he cleaned up his floor.
I am over here cheering him on.
Unfortunately, I told him he could just place the things he doesn’t want in the hallway, so now I have this mess to clean up:
That’s on me. Giving him a box or bag for it all would have been better, but I was busy.
What next?
When you finish the 101 class, there is a Flylady Decluttering 102 class. I am doing that one now.
I am on day five, and I did not even do any decluttering until day three because I wasn’t feeling it, but that’s okay. Progress not perfection!
When I finish the 102 class, I will type up a review of it too.
Decluttering is such an important part of this process because if you have the cleanest house in the world, but it is all covered up in stacks of papers and junk everywhere, your house still looks messy.
I am not there yet, but I am working on it, and I am so excited about the progress we are making here.
Have you tried out any of these Flylady videos or classes yet? What did you think?
Click here to check out the Flylady 101 Class.
Click here for my viral article on How to Stop Being a Clothes Hoarder.
I have followed FlyLady for years. Ok, well, I tried to follow some of the weekly routines for a few weeks but I physically couldn’t do it, so I didn’t keep up with those deep cleaning parts. BUT I did successfully implement other strategies. And it was very affirming to me that some of the routines I already had were recognized by someone else, like getting dressed first thing in the morning. I don’t put on outdoor shoes because I believe bringing in all that nasty from the outdoors is just gross, but I do wear slippers. The point is to be ready for the day. And be ready if you have to leave the house for an emergency. I have the kids do a couple of the daily tasks like the sinks. But my goal has always been to have my house be in a somewhat clean state for drop in guests. Not perfectly organized, but at least clean enough for them to use the bathroom and have a place to sit for coffee or tea. But I agree with you that FlyLady is very encouraging about progress and not perfection, and the mix and matching of the routines with what you are able to do and not worrying if you need to skip something. I did buy a few of the tools and yes, they do work well! I love the weekly house “blessing” idea, although I think I got that from another blogger. Oh, the shine the sink every night is something I was already doing because my mom did it and then I helped her with dishes growing up. I air dry dishes as much as I can. I stay up late so I find putting a load of wash in the washer at night is fine, and then hopefully getting it switched to the dryer before I got to bed works for me because then the kids can put it away during their morning chores while I’m doing the morning chores (we homeschool so we have time in the morning). Again, my mom always did laundry at night as well. I just do laundry as it accumulates. It’s really the deep cleaning that I was and still am having trouble with. Now I just kind of randomly do it if I see something that is dirty. I take 10 minutes to clean that little area like a couple of windows or cabinet doors. I can only handle that much physical activity at a time with my health conditions. That’s the other thing, only tackling 10-15 minutes at a time. It’s so doable with the rest of life! I’m glad you enjoyed the class and were encouraged. I get the emails and pretty much ignore them right now, but they serve as a reminder of the program for when I am able to put more effort into it. Great job!
This week has been so crazy I couldn’t get hardly any of it done, so now I’m extra thankful I did it on the regular weeks.
I definitely cannot keep up with alllll the things.