My granddaughter sent me a video a few weeks ago.
It was a young woman, maybe thirty, standing in front of a closet. She opened the doors, and then, with both arms, she swept every single thing inside it onto the floor. Sweaters, shoes, boxes, a tangle of belts. All of it, in one big heap on the carpet.
The caption said something like “the chaos method changed my life.”
I’ll be honest. My first reaction was to laugh.
Because I have spent a good part of my sixties learning how to make less mess, not more. The idea that the path to a tidy home runs straight through a giant pile on the floor sounded like something invented by a person who has never been too tired to finish what she started.
But then I kept seeing it.
It was in an article I read the next week. A friend at church mentioned it. There was a whole piece about it in a magazine at the dentist’s office. The chaos method, the chaos method, the chaos method. Everywhere I looked.
So I decided to stop having opinions about something I’d never tried.
At 64, I have learned that I am allowed to be wrong about things. I have also learned that the only honest way to tell you whether something works is to actually do it myself, in my own house, with my own knees and my own energy and my own pantry.
So that’s what I did.
What follows is the honest account. What the chaos method is, what happened when I tried it, what it got right, and the moment it almost went very wrong. And then, at the end, my real thoughts on who I think it will genuinely help, and who I think should skip it entirely.
Because here’s what I’ve already decided after trying it.
The chaos method is not for everyone. And the people telling you it is have probably never run out of energy halfway through a job.
Let me tell you what happened.