Routine Redo: My Cleaning Routine

One of my goals this year was to revamp all of my routines. After moving to a new house and getting a new job with a completely new schedule, the structure of my basic habits were just a hot mess at the start of the year. When it comes to keeping up with chores around the house, I wanted to find a system that was simple, easy and attainable. We’re all busy, and somehow on top of everything else we do in our lives, we’re supposed to be a functioning human that has clean clothes and clean dishes and clean toilets. (Hands in the air emoji). Here’s what’s been working for me:

IDENTIFY ONE NON-NEGOTIABLE: I decided to choose one area of the house that would be my priority for keeping clean every single day. For me, and probably for many of you, that area was the kitchen. Let’s face it, food and dirty dishes can get gross and somehow, if my kitchen feels clean, my house automatically feels cleaner. So, the kitchen gets my attention every night. Loading the dishwasher, wiping the counters, sweeping the floor, etc. There are definitely days where I come home late and tired so I wait till the next morning, but I am keeping up with the kitchen on a daily basis.

FIGURE OUT HOW OFTEN YOU REALLY NEED TO DO SOMETHING: I took out a piece of paper and just wrote down all the specific cleaning tasks I like to do in each room, like “dust living room”, “vacuum master bedroom”, and “clean master bath shower”. And then I made a choice on how often I wanted to do that task- Weekly? Bi-Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly?

I personally find that I don’t have one huge chunk of time on a given day to just clean my whole house in one shot. It’s much more common that I have little pockets of time available here and there. I used this handy free printable from Day Designer to plan out and schedule a day of the week for each cleaning task..

GO DIGITAL: Now, I’m a paper nerd, forever and always. I have a paper planner that I use every single day, but I do use Google calendar for a few things, including my cleaning tasks. What’s great about digital calendars is that you can set a task to repeat according to your schedule. So when I want to remind myself to clean our master bath every single week, I put it in on my calendar for Wednesday and set it to repeat every single Wednesday. It’s set and I never have to remember! You can set an item to repeat, daily, weekly, monthly or even every few months. What’s especially great is if you push an item off to another day, you can move the calendar appointment and then it automatically shifts every following appointment back to stay on with your schedule.

That’s the routine that’s been working for me lately! How do you guys clean your house? In small pieces like me? Or do you blast some tunes and have one major session a week?

Hey, I’m Meghan

I’m here sharing content all about pursuing your own version of more and loving how you feel doing it. If that sounds good to you, stick around and let’s be friends!

When You Have Too Much To Do

SPOILER ALERT: FREE PRINTABLE BELOW!

Have you ever had one those days-or honestly, those weeks, months and entire seasons- where you have so much do to that you can’t even remember what all of the things even are? I’ve had a few of those lately when I was overwhelmed with everything swirling around in my head that I didn’t even know where to start or what to do first. Here’s what I did to get organized and start tackling my life:

1. Just write it all down on paper. (Or on an app on your phone if that’s what works best for you.) You’ve got to clear everything out of your head before deciding what to tackle first. Just make a list of everything- big or small- that’s inside your brain, and just write it out. You can focus on one thing at a time when you’ve reassured yourself that everything you need to remember is safely in one place for you to reference later. This is traditionally called a ‘brain dump’, but frankly that term grosses me out and I refuse to use it. Or, rather, use it again since I just did.

2. Decide what is urgent and important. Most articles on productivity will probably tell you to prioritize your tasks, but don’t give any detail on a strategy for how to actually DO that prioritization. Using Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix, here’s what you do:

Take a piece of paper and divide it into four sections:

1. Urgent and important

2. Important, not urgent

3. Urgent, not important

4. Not urgent and not important

Take your to-do list and categorize every item into a category. Be really honest with yourself here! Is it really urgent or just a task you’d prefer to do first because it’s easier or more fun?

3. Now that you know what is most important and most urgent, you’ve got to make a plan to actually get it done. Look at your schedule and ask “When do I have time to take care of this?” What I like to do when my days are extra crazy is plan out how much time I’ll realistically need to check something off my list. This stops me from trying to do too much in one period of time.

I’ve found that I’m actually better at guesstimating times than I thought I would be. When in doubt, plan more time than you think you’ll need. It’s way too discouraging to get behind your plan than it is to be ahead of schedule.

4. Start at the top of your urgent and important items and schedule them in one by one, with realistic expectations of how long it will take you to do them. Move on to important items,  then urgent ones, and lastly to the non-urgent, non important ones if you still have time. Consider asking for help with any task that you don’t personally have to do yourself. Spread the tasks out over days or weeks as needed and don’t feel bad for taking something off the list completely if it’s not necessary!

To help you out on the busy days when you need it most, here’s a free printable with the matrix for you to use!

Tell me more about what you do when you have too much to do? Do you make lists? I’d love to know in the comments below!

Hey, I’m Meghan

I’m here sharing content all about pursuing your own version of more and loving how you feel doing it. If that sounds good to you, stick around and let’s be friends!