How to Develop a Regular Cleaning Schedule
Staying on top of all the housework can often times feel overwhelming and never ending. If you want to feel like you are in control of your home instead of your home controlling you, consider developing a cleaning schedule.
No we aren’t crazy….setting aside one to two hours every week or every other week is actually a great way to manage your home and stay on top of things. Following a schedule is practically a guaranteed fix to regain control over your house and eliminate the likelihood of feeling behind on household chores.
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The use of a schedule allows you to lead the life you want without feeling stressed regarding tasks you need to do around your home. Creating a schedule also means that you can design it around your life - so you don’t have to think about it, just get things done and checked off on their respective days. No more guilt about what else you should be doing – you know that you will be getting to everything at the perfect time for you.
It’s time to get to grips with the house. Keep reading below for our easy step by step guide to create your very own cleaning schedule – and take back your home (and life) once and for all!
Make a List of Your Chores
Before you can write a realistic cleaning schedule for your home, you need to know what you have to clean to begin with. First, go around your home and in each room write down ALL the necessary cleaning tasks. Additionally, make sure to write how often you would need to have it done.
Ta-da - this is your cleaning checklist!
Remember not to get overwhelmed during this stage, as it can look like a lot to get all these jobs done. It’s important to see what exactly needs to be completed, and get something in place to tackle it all.
Group Tasks by Frequency
The next step is to group the jobs into how often they need to be done – which will then allow you to allocate times for the tasks much more easily. This will also give you a much better idea of what you will need to do each day/week etc…..
Please note, there is no right or wrong way to do this, just what works best for your environment. Some people need to clean more frequently, while others need less cleaning for various reasons. Basically, everyone’s needs will be different, and your ideal timings for how often your chores need to be done will likely be different as well.
The key take away here is to make sure that if everything on your list was done, according to your preferred frequency, your home would run smoothly. Lastly, everything would be clean to your standards, and you would feel back in control of your home again.
Examine Your Free Time
Okay, so now it’s time to get real, which means putting some of your own life’s constraints into the equation…
It is common for people to overestimate what they can get done in a set amount of time, which can easily lead to disappointment. We want to encourage you to think carefully about all aspects of your life when looking at what time you have available in your schedule.
Your current schedule (if you have one) likely includes things such as work, social time, clubs, hobbies, school, fitness etc….
We want to recommend that you also include things like time to get dressed, eating, shopping etc… and ensure that you have blocked out travel time as well. This is often forgotten and leads to over scheduling. We know this makes the tasks of creating a schedule tedious, but all of these steps are intended to make sure you actually have time to get your cleaning done! A more detailed and precise schedule will provide a much more realistic idea of what time you have left throughout the week.
Finalize Your Cleaning Schedule
Last but certainly not least, is putting everything together and filling in your schedule when you will do each of the tasks you have listed – so that everything gets done as often as you want, within the time you have available. Make sure you take time to work through your weekly schedule, and start to allocate the jobs from your list onto specific days.
As you start to become more organized with the schedule, you will also need to make sure the theory of what you have done actually works in practice. The only way to work this out is to stick to your schedule for an extended time period. We recommend trying it out for at least one month. This will give you a chance to see all of the following things: –
Things that work well
Things that don’t work well
Whether things take longer/less time than thought
What time you REALLY have available each day
Whether everything is getting done
This will provide an opportunity to reflect on the efficiency of your schedule and determine if it is necessary to alter things.
That’s it…you’re all done! You now have something that can help you stay on top of the house from now on – and what could be better than that!