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!
