Listen my dear, when you’re older, you’ll have a schedule that you’ll be the master of—yes, you! What you eat, when you sleep, where you go. It will all be in the palm of your hand. There’s great value in having a routine and being good to your body. You have work in the morning? Well, you get to bed at a decent hour. You’re starving? Well, better eat something filling.

Have control over your life, your schedule and how you take care of yourself and your home. But also, be flexible on when you can bend the rules. If you look at your life like a ruler (you know, the plastic kind you use in school), you can bend it a little and it will spring back to its straightened state. You bend it too much and it will break. Same is true in life, know how much you can bend…and by God, bend your ruler.

I once heard that you won’t remember the nights you went to bed early or you stayed in to do the laundry. Those things make you feel good; they make you feel productive, but they’re not memorable. (Unless you have some mean folding skills). What you remember is the time you spend with people you care about or enjoy—whether you’re doing interesting things or having interesting conversations.  Those are the memorable moments.

This morning I woke up and said, “Today, I clean.” Just looking at my wreck of a house made my skin crawl. Things weren’t put away, there were dirty dishes in the sink, and I felt plain poopy about it. “Once I get a few hours of cleaning in… THEN I can enjoy my day.” Well, through persuasion, what I ended up doing was not putting things away or doing dishes. My day was spent bopping around town, shopping, getting coffee and having lunch at a sports bar downtown with my husband.

As I was sitting at the bar drinking my $5 Long Island, I thought about all the things that I could be doing at home. And then I thought, “Well this is so much better than that!” (So Elle Woods to Warner re career success vs. hot-tub-fun after Winter formal). The dishes and the clothes can wait, but how often does a beautiful schedule-free day come along that you can enjoy with someone you love? Not often enough.

So listen my dear, keep your life in check. Be sure that you don’t have dirty dishes piled up high enough to interest the producers of “Hoarders”. But don’t let things like clothes, dishes or sleep (yes, sweet, beautiful, sleep) keep you from having memorable moments in your life.