Household Cleaning Schedules

If you lead a busy life and feel like life is out-of-control on the home front, household cleaning schedules may be the organizational tool you need to help bring relief.

Keep up with house cleaning tasks.

While many people don't realize the underlying reason for the struggle they fight with keeping the house clean, many times the root to the problem can be found in the fact that clutter thwarts the best-laid plans when it comes to keeping things clean. Dealing with clutter is time consuming and exhausting. By the time you get done putting away clutter, if you ever can be done with it, your valuable time and energy has been used up. To top it off, the house is neater but it isn't really cleaner. The following books are written to help people learn how to deal with clutter as well as learning how to develop a schedule for cleaning house that works for their unique situation.

• Houseworks: Cut the Clutter, Speed Your Cleaning and Calm the Chaos
• Eliminate Chaos: The 10-Step Process to Organize Your Home and Life
• It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff
• Organize It!: How to Declutter Every Nook and Cranny in and Outside Your Home
• The New Messies Manual: The Procrastinator's Guide to Good Housekeeping

Once you get your house organized, keeping up with the clutter is one of the secrets to keeping it clean. Pay attention to your hotspots. You know; the places where the stuff tends to gather. Places like countertops, tabletops, dresser tops, shelves—in other words flat surfaces. Once you identify those hotspots in your home, one of the first things to list regularly on your cleaning schedule is to check the hotspots for clutter and to put away anything that's found it's way there. If you tackle clutter while it is a few things rather than a pile of stuff, the job is easy, quick and lets you get on with what you really want to accomplish. Plus you'll be surprised, when you keep clutter under control you'll be more energized when it comes to cleaning the house.

Once you learn to deal with the clutter and have it under control, developing household cleaning schedules for the entire house is best done by breaking tasks into pieces. Make a list of what needs to be done and highlight items that are the most overwhelming. For example, the mounds of laundry that collect for you to do on the weekend. Instead of saving that chore for the end of the week, plan to do one load each day. This breaks one big task into mini tasks so it is never overloads your schedule by taking up an entire day. Plus, if you happen to miss a day, it's not the end of the world.

Look at your list and the household tasks you've highlighted. Those items will most likely fit into a daily schedule to break them into segments just like the laundry example above.

How you choose to schedule the cleaning that needs to be done is up to you. There's no one right or wrong way. However, the example above has worked for many. Breaking your cleaning chores into daily, weekly and monthly tasks would look something like this:

Weekly Task List:

• Monday: Dust mop
• Tuesday: Change sheets
• Wednesday: Clean bathrooms (including floors)
• Thursday: Dust all rooms
• Friday: Clean kitchen (including floor)
• Saturday: Vacuum

You may want to create a daily task list too that includes things like:

Daily Task List:

• Make bed
• Empty/refill dishwasher
• Do a load of laundry

Monthly Task List:

A monthly cleaning schedule would include things like:

• Clean refrigerator
• Clean the oven
• Straighten dresser drawers

When drawing up household cleaning schedules, don't think you have to be superwoman and do all the work yourself. If you have a family, they should all have a part in helping to keep the house orderly and clean. Children can be assigned tasks like unloading or reloading the dishwasher. If you have more than one child this task can rotate with child A assigned to Monday, child B on Tuesday, and so on, alternating days. If you don't have a dishwasher, child A can wash the dishes and child B can dry and put away.

It's also a good idea to teach children to pick up the clutter for which they are responsible. Include this as a task on their daily check list, and remind them that they will have less to do if they don't clutter in the first place.

Household cleaning schedules take some thought and tweaking as you put together schedules that work for your family's situation. Once you get the hang of it, you'll have a list of daily, weekly, monthly and even quarterly tasks. You'll be surprised the difference it makes to break the work into smaller doable tasks rather than to let cleaning the house consume your weekends.

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