How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing
K.C. Davis
How to Keep House While Drowning will introduce you to six life-changing principles that will revolutionize the way you approach home care—without endless to-do lists. Presented in 31 daily thoughts, this compassionate guide will help you begin to get free of the shame and anxiety you feel over home care. Inside you will learn: · How to shift your perspective of care tasks from moral to functional; · How to stop negative self-talk and shame around care tasks; · How to give yourself permission to rest, even when things aren’t finished; · How to motivate yourself to care for your space. more
156 pages, Kindle Edition
First published S&S/Simon Element
4.27
Rating
46231
Ratings
6865
Reviews
K.C. Davis
2 books 320 followers
Community reviews
short, sweet, and validating as fuck. more
I believe deeply in letting go of shame*, especially when it comes to house work. There are a lot of reasons why house keeping can get away from you and putting a lot of shame on yourself about it is unnecessary and counter productive. I know this deeply and truly about other people. It is much much harder to apply those beliefs to myself. How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 Days of Compassionate Help is very short, and on Kindle Unlimited, if you have that. more
Bumping up to 5 stars because the book came for my neck. Quote to prove it: “When you view care tasks as moral, the motivation for completing them is often shame. When everything is in its place, you don’t feel like a failure. If you are completing the care tasks with a motivation of shame, you are also probably relaxing in shame too, because care tasks never end and you view rest as a reward. ” Though I wasn’t struggling with house care and chores and therefore probably won’t follow her suggestions, I still found this book helpful for my unhealthy relationship to productivity. more
Simple and super short, but a lot of encouragement packed into a tiny space. Just the simple reframe- “household tasks are not moral issues” has helped my mental health already. more
As an autistic, my life consists of rules on “how to be a person”. It’s the only way I can sort of make sense of the world. However, it caused me to consider everything I do (or not do) as good or bad. I had never considered I’m not a terrible person for not having a spotless home. Basically not clean = bad person, bad adult, failure. more
“How to Keep House While You’re Drowning” is the first self-help book that made me improve my life in spite of the book rather than because of it. Whenever the author said it was okay to not do something, like doing the dishes, I went and did it anyway. If I looked up K. C. Davis before reading, I would have never checked this book out from my library — I’ve yet to find one “blogger with a book” who has written a good book. more
Feels weird to review a book about cleaning I read in 25 minutes on my lunch break. Even weirder that I would give it five stars if I were in the habit of rating books anymore. It's very short, less than 75 pages. However, I was honestly very moved by this book about cleaning that I read in 25 minutes on my lunch break. Hygiene and keeping my spaces clean (care tasks, as Davis calls them), are tasks I struggle with a lot due to ADHD and [distant yelling over the sound of "Serotonin" by girl in red]. more
Only have two baby bottles to clean. No problem, run the entire dishwasher. Only have a couple things to wash. No problem, run the entire washing machine and dryer cycle. Too tired to consider the enormous carbon footprint caused by choices made to alleviate your own exhaustion. more
Anything worth doing is worth doing partially. I've been watching KC's Tiktok videos for a little while now and have immensely enjoyed the way she interweaves self-care, cleaning/organizing, and therapy, so when I realized she had this little book on KU, I wanted to check it out right away - and I'm so glad I did. Even if you've watched every video on her Tiktok account over at @domesticblisters, I still recommend reading this. It's so short, very easy to read through, and adds some really incredible insight into what causes our brains to view care tasks as something morally charged and something worthy of stressing over or faulting ourselves for — instead of what they should be: a morally neutral path to helping ourselves function in daily life, to whatever degree. You do not exist to maintain a space of static perfection. more
Uuugh, this book, it just. wasn't for me. And lets just get this out of the way, this is my opinion, the author, and anybody reading this can have their own and do whatever the F they want, that's the great thing about being a grown up out in the world. I could say I'm not the target audience (I don't have kids, which is addressed somewhere near half, but for real, it just feels very geared towards parents, so that was alienating from jump). but that's not it, because I do fall into some of the things this book is aimed at. more
3. 5 Sometimes one is just not up to par, either physically or mentally, or both. This book does a good job describing short cuts, while making the point of points, that this is not something for which one should feel shame. Keeping house with its myriad of chores, is often not easy during the best of times, and near impossible at others. Loved her matter of fact approach and though some of it is common sense, others will be of use. more
I waited a long time for this library book. I was #44 in line. After reading it, I don't understand why it is so popular. Is it just the title. Overall this book is very very repetitive, with the main topics being dishes and laundry and be kind to your self. more
”you do not exist to serve your space, your space exists to serve you. ”very calming self help book on learning how to be gentle and kind to yourself when struggling to keep up with activities of daily living and instrumental activities of daily living. it really helped me with understanding that feeling “shame” from falling behind actually deters you from doing your tasks and continues to put you in a negative headspace. shifting your mindset towards completing tasks because you need a more functional space is more beneficial than constantly telling yourself you’re a failure. i would recommend this if you struggle with negative self talk, and want helpful tips on how to be kind to yourself and still get work done. more
I feel like this book isn't for me. And that isn't to say I don't agree that cleaning and organizing is a functional activity and not a moral one, and that it's important to do what you can and find what works for you. But this book is very much for people who struggle with being externally motivated instead of internally motivated and who are vulnerable to shame, which isn't me. I know the title is How to Keep house While Drowning, but for some reason I didn't think "Oh, this is for people with depression" I was thinking more, "Oh, this is for people who have more to do than they CAN do. " While this attempts to cover both groups of people, I think it's much more for people who suffer from negative self-talk or who are emotionally overwhelmed due to trauma, and less for people who are simply extremely busy or overwhelmed because of external factors. more
Apologies but why is this rated so highly. It’s dreadful. I bought it on Emily Oster’s endorsement but feel the 30 dollars spent was terribly wasteful. Really average advice. . more
Morality concerns itself with the goodness or badness of your character and the rightness or wrongness of decisions…. How you relate to care tasks—whether you are clean or dirty, messy or tidy, organized or unorganized—has absolutely no bearing on whether you are a good enough person. I think I knew this in my head, but my gut feelings don't match. I heard somewhere that women view their homes as representations of themselves. Often when they want their lives to change, they start by working on their homes. more
This is an incredibly kind, thoughtful, and sensible little book for anyone who's feeling overwhelmed in their home, whether that overwhelm comes from an external life-crisis, overwork, depression, a physical illness/disability, or any other factor. Davis firmly divorces care tasks (housecleaning, hygiene, etc) from morality and shame and focuses on self-compassion and functionality. Because she's aiming this book at a varied audience with lots of different struggle-factors, not every tip will be needed by every reader - but I found the whole book to be incredibly warm and healing and exactly what I needed after a rough year and a half of family health issues. Highly recommended. more
Somebody online called the author lazy in 2020 and she is still so bitter and angry about it that she wrote this book. There's nothing helpful or empowering, just lots of ranting and waffling on. Awful. . more
Ohhhhh this one got me. I tried and tried and tried some more to keep in mind she was in the trenches with PPD during pandemic lockdown when she wrote this, but I still can’t help but think, so I’ll just say it—have some respect for yourself and your family and take even the smallest granule of responsibility. I don’t recall where I found this book but remember saving it to read now before I have my second baby thinking it may offer some tips to reorganizing the home life and daily chores while I’m on maternity leave with a baby and a toddler. But literally all this book did is make me laugh and realize I could do absolutely squat and still accomplish more than this woman without even trying. Her tips aren’t tips, they’re giving up on yourself and your family and then to go a step further, justifying to yourself that it’s completely okay to be a lazy bum. more
Wow. Very short and to the point. Appreciate the fuck out of this book. . more
K. C. Davis was about to give birth to her second child. Suspecting her post-partum anxiety might make a reappearance, she arranged for daycare, a nanny, and family to assist. She had every single duck in its row when the pandemic hit and lockdown was announced. more
4. 5 stars This is an important book and it was life-changing to me. I'm a mess. Always have been, and probably always will be. I've struggled with keeping house my entire life, my room as a child was always a mess. more
Potrzebowałem krótkiego audiobooka do sprzątania i książka skończyła się zanim ja skończyłem sprzątać XD. Ale to raczej nie dla mnie, na pewno niektórzy powinni usłyszeć rzeczy które autorka ma do powiedzenia, za to do mojego życia niczego nie wniosła. Miejscami trochę mało inkluzywna jak na coś, co już w samym wstępie deklaruje inkluzywność, ale nie czepiam się na siłę. . more
This book made me so angry. The title should have been different because there are almost NO TIPS on how to keep a house clean…it validates not having a clean house, and they it’s ok to not be ok. Which is fine, but the titile and description were really deceiving. more
I literally want to cry reading this. This was genuinely what I needed to hear and have someone say to me. This may honestly end up being a favorite read of the year. This book is already so comforting as somebody who really struggles and has been struggling with keeping my house clean since my depression has gotten worse in the last few months. My lack of cleaning within the house has really been getting to me and making me feel like I just can't do anything. more
I could write a book on all the reasons I did not care for this book or think it was effective. To list a few:1. The author belittles other methods to make hers seem better. 2. The author can't even follow her own rules/methods/advice. more
i want to say nice things about this because i strongly agree with the premise and it’s very sweet, but. just not a lot of effort feels like it was made toward making this a book. a good concept delivered in slightly expanded blog listicle format. more