I have been given an enormous freedom: the freedom to dry my dishes with a drying towel and put them away immediately.  I know, this sounds a bit strange.  For years now, I have had a drying rack.  Our family would unload the dishwasher onto it and we would allow the dishes to dry for hours — usually overnight.  Then, we would come back to a mess that would still need to be put away. Often the dish cycle was not complete before I needed to unload the dishwasher again, and I had not yet put the dishes away from the previous dish cycle. This was an ongoing source of frustration and agitation in our family. The kicker of this problem is that I didn’t even recognize that it was a problem. Through all of my best efforts of ‘5S‘ing the house, I somehow missed what should have been an obvious “Please 5S this Clutter Catcher” area.  It was a constant irritant, and yet, I had no idea that it was such a problem area.  I had even less of an idea of what to do about it. Then one day, we happened upon the “Fly Lady.” In about a day, this woman changed my life and my sink. One of her first lessons is shining your sink. (Click here to visit the lesson.) After reading this, it became apparent that the drying rack was doing nothing but creating an extra step. I can just dry the dishes with a drying towel as I am putting them away. I don’t want to sound dense, but the idea had not really occurred to me. Truly, I have the freedom to just dry the dishes and put them away as I unload the dishwasher. And while I am at it, I dry the sink with my towel when I am done to help shine the sink for the next time I use it. This has the added benefit of keeping the number of dishes used to a minimum. To make it more of a habit, we run the dishwasher now every night whether it is completely full or not. This way we established the habit of unloading the dishwasher and putting the dishes away in the morning to get the day off to a good cleaning start. Our family is six members strong at this point, so running the dishwasher every night may or may not work for you. Both my wife and I have been doing this for about a month now. I will never go back.  My drying rack was offered to the garbage man this morning as a sign of my commitment. Honestly, there was no love lost on this one.