How to Keep House While Drowning

What Hacker News says

1. fullburleyJul 2023
   1. Give yourself some understanding and grace. You are a good parent, doing your best, never forget that. "How to Keep House While Drowning" I have found to be a good read to help here. 2. Find an expert, hopefully near your region to help with management 3. Find any patient advocacy or support groups to connect and learn from.
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2. code_biologistJun 2023
   I have ADHD and though I love having a tidy home I struggle to make it happen. Still, I find chores to be a low stakes daily dojo to practice prioritization, executive function lol, "good enough" nonjudgemental thinking and all those values.

   Two books helped me greatly and they both call out the exact distinction between perfection and efficiency you do. Consciously giving up on "efficiency" has helped me finish a lot of projects I otherwise would have put off for far too long!

   The books are "How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind" by Dana White for ADHD folks, "How to Keep House While Drowning" by KC Davis for when life is f'ed. Heartily recommend both.

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3. grepLeighMar 2023
   Most posts offer the obvious suggestions (The Mom Test, High Growth Handbook, The Personal MBA, The Power Law, Hard Thing about Hard Thing, Will It Fly, etc), so I'll focus on some non-obvious suggestions.

   For tactical advice, I find talks/podcasts and mastermind groups more useful than books. My favorite podcast (by far) is Rob Walling's Startups for the Rest of Us, which is oriented towards building a capital-efficient bootstrapped business. The archive is full of extremely valuable tactical advice.

   The books I've found most helpful on my entrepreneurship journey are about mental health, emotional intelligence, and relationships of all kinds. Sharing a few that have had a profound impact, since they helped me metabolize and understand what drove me to become a founder in the first place.

   1. The Self-Compassion Skills Workbook by Tim Desmond

   2. Path of Compassion by Thich Nhat Hanh

   3. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, Philippa Perry

   4. Burnout, Emily Nagoski

   5. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Lindsay C. Gibson

   6. Self-Compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff

   7. How to Keep House While Drowning, KC Davis

   8. Deploy Empathy, Michele Hansen

   9. The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel A. Van der Kolk

   10. Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown

   11. What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey

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4. ex3xuJan 2023
   I found KC Davis's 2022 book How to Keep House While Drowning to be a nice complementary update to Kondo's techniques.

   On a practical level Davis focuses on accumulated mess as 5 things: (1) trash, (2) dishes, (3) laundry, (4) things that have a place and are not in their place, and (5) things that do not have a place.

   The book adds some interesting psychological framing which I found helpful -- treating care tasks as morally neutral, for example. Her techniques target ADHD-types as well as people undergoing life changes (like Marie Kondo starting a family) or otherwise have strict time/energy constraints. Her Struggle Care website [0] has a pretty detailed primer on her philosophy.

   [0]: https://www.strugglecare.com/struggle-care

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5. teucrisJan 2023
   I will caveat this with something I learned from “How to Keep House While Drowning” - an incredible book for overwhelmed parents, neurodivergent people, and those going through depression:

   Make your home work for you, don’t work for your home.

   If that means the best way for you to live your life is to leave things out so you can find them more easily, then do that. Chances are though that having a “home” for everything (mentioned in other comments) is going to work better for you. It’s a process of learning and iteration.

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