The FlyLady's following
Call Marla Cilley, 52, organized. Call her orderly. Call her systematic. But don’t call Cilley, the organizational maven known as the FlyLady to her nearly 500,000 “flybaby” followers, perfect.
“The word I hate is perfect,” Cilley says. “If it were perfect it would be a boring, boring life.
To prove she’s not perfect, Cilley admits even the FlyLady can have what she calls “side-tracked“ moments.
“Our house stays pretty much clean all the time,” she says. “But today I have been searching for something I put in a safe place.”
The place was so safe Cilley never did come across the paper she was looking for. However, while once the hunt would have stressed her out, now she’s able to take it in stride and can even see the bright side.
“Today I have looked through all my memorabilia and it’s been fun,” Cilley says. “It’s been a nasty, rainy day and I’ve gotten to reminisce going through this stuff.”
Turn chaos into order—step by step
Cilley advocates learning to “FLY” (Finally Love Yourself) by getting your house, calendar and life in order using a series of babysteps, which eventually turn into habits.
Cilley’s own organizational problems dated back to childhood when her naturally neat sister used to cover for her. “We roomed together all through high school,” Cilley says. “I didn’t realize it but she picked up after me and put my clothes away.”
Then, later in life when Cilley had already accumulated her own houseful of clutter, she married a man with a similarly jam-packed household. The result, Cilley says, was “wall to wall stuff” and the effects were crippling.
