The Good Enough Guide to Better Living: Leave Your Dishes in the Sink, Serve Your Guests Leftovers, and Make the Most Out of Doing the Least at Home

By Alison Throckmorton

With an abundance of hilarious household tips, Leave Your Dishes in the Sink is here to teach you how to look like you're doing the most by doing less.

Most home economics books share the same guidance: “the best way of doing things.” In a world of Instagram-worthy homes and Pinterest-perfect meals, sometimes the best way of doing things feels unattainable. Leave Your Dishes in the Sink teaches you how to work with life’s most relatable habits to create the illusion of upkeep and a façade of cleanliness. Taking you room by room—from the kitchen and the living room to the bedroom and the bathroom—you’ll learn the proper (aka easiest) way of doing things. Avoid dirty dishes by eating out of the jar. Choose the houseplant that will match your level of self-doubt. And who needs folding the laundry when you have The Chair? You’ll even find out how to entertain your guests without them noticing you haven’t vacuumed your carpet since you signed your lease.

With the help of elegant charts and diagrams, you’ll find answers to some of the life’s toughest questions, including:

• How do I fold a fancy napkin? (Just don’t.)
• Does a bucket count as a cup? (Yes.)
• Which way does the toilet paper roll go? (Who cares!)

Witty and absurd, Leave Your Dishes in the Sink is a hilarious reminder that real life exists and it’s okay to give yourself a break. By doing less, you too can create your dream home—or at least one that’s totally fine just the way it is.
The best kind of self-improvement book, this anti-perfectionism guide gives you permission to give yourself a break while getting in some laughs!

LAUGH-OUT-LOUD RELATABLE: Author Alison Throckmorton perfectly distills all the universal shortcuts we take as adults trying to keep it all together, like leaving your dishes in the sink "to soak" and using that one chair you have as a second dresser.

REAL-WORLD HOUSEHOLD HINTS & TIPS: For anyone exhausted by searching for things that spark joy or the TikToks pushing housecleaning as therapy, this guide offers the perfect mix of parody and empathy. Step over the laundry pile to flip through these delightfully illustrated pages for tips and tricks to finding happiness among the chaos.

FUNNY GIFT FOR EVERYBODY: This book makes a great gift for a recent graduate, a friend who just became a homeowner or renter, a new mom, or a parent who has been keeping the house together for thirty years.

Perfect for:

• Anyone who hates doing household chores (everyone)
• Millennials trying to adult
• New renters or homeowners
• Gift-giving for birthday, graduation, Mother’s Day, or Father's Day
• Readers of Feathered & Fabulous, The Underachiever's Manifesto, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: Mar 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781797217918

Alison Throckmorton

Alison Throckmorton is a writer, editor, and domestic underachiever living in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Book preview

Introduction

Welcome to, if not the foremost guide on appearing to meet all the expectations in your home by doing the least amount possible, then a solid sixth-place candidate. Many tomes about home economics have been written—all focused on enhancing productivity and reaching household goals. Here, the author asks you to put away perfectionist ideas of potato ricers and pancake pens and direct your efforts to more noble pursuits, like napping, knitting hats for your guinea pig, or binge-watching true-crime shows while eating cheese puffs. Avoid the cleaning schedules and hospital-corner sheets and instead DIY (term used very loosely) your own sheets, napkins, and towels with the simple-to- follow instructions contained herein. Evade the pressures of entertaining and instead lean in to some light mendacity to achieve your home entertaining goals.

The domestic sphere is a kind of witchcraft, and true mastery of doing less can create the illusion of upkeep and the deception of cleanliness. Discover how to apply a filter to your home in the same way you might with a less-than-flattering selfie. By subtly and expertly redirecting the focus from the absolute chaos that is your everyday life, you can create, if not quite your dream home, at least one that does not cause you and your guests to wince when you step inside.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Within these pages you will find not-always-tried and sometimes-true advice about managing the demands of your home. Settle in, comfortable in the knowledge that this guide expects very little of you. Read it cover to cover and apply every tip and trick to your life, scan the topics and interact with the ones that speak to you most, or read the book and do nothing with the information. You are the master of your domain.

The Kitchen

If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?

—Julia Child

The kitchen is the hearth of the home and where it is estimated that the average person spends two thousand hours per year.* A well-appointed kitchen is a workshop and place of delicious creation. Why not lean in, using the least amount of energy and resources possible, and enjoy the ups and downs that are the savory delights of caramelized onions with the fecund sludge that is the salad bag in the very back of the fridge? There are no rules about knowing what you’re doing—how you appear to be doing is all that matters.

*Author has guessed based on feeling.

KITCHEN UTENSILS:

A Replacement Guide

There are many kitchen gadgets and