Cleaning house without a cleaning schedule is like cleaning the house blind. A cleaning schedule acts as a guiding hand – showing us what we should be focusing on and giving our energy and attention to. Often times we may find ourselves trying to clean the entire house in a single day, wearing ourselves out and not having any energy left over. Cleaning house should never have to work you that hard, nor take so much of your time; with an effective cleaning schedule you can drastically cut down on the time you have to spend cleaning.
What you learn by using a cleaning schedule is that there are specific times when certain cleaning tasks should be taken care of and when they shouldn’t. By organizing yourself on a daily, weekly, monthly, semi-annual, and yearly basis cleaning becomes a whole lot easier!
When creating a cleaning schedule we first want to be able to sit down in a quiet place, away from distractions, and think about all of the cleaning tasks our household has. It’s important to do this when you have time to yourself so you can properly focus. If there are distractions, chances are you will miss certain cleaning tasks and your schedule won’t be as effective.
Go ahead and get yourself a writing utensil and a piece of paper. Write down all the cleaning tasks that you come up with, and list them according to the rooms of the house they belong to. All cleaning tasks related to bedrooms should go under a bedroom header. Same applies for all kitchen, bathroom, living room, and outside cleaning tasks as well. What this does is categorizes your cleaning tasks so that you can have an in-depth overview of your house’s cleaning requirements.
Now that we have an organized list of everything that needs cleaning in our house lets organize each one by its priority. Next to every cleaning task that you have written down, label next to it whether it is a cleaning task that should be done on a daily, weekly, monthly, semi-annual, or yearly basis. By doing this you won’t have to remember when these tasks need to be done because your schedule will show you.
After we have made our list and labeled each cleaning task according to priority, it’s time to organize it a bit further. Group together all of your daily cleaning tasks together. Do the same for your weekly, monthly, semi-annual, and yearly cleaning tasks. We should now have an organized list that shows us everything we should be focusing on, on a daily, weekly, monthly, semi-annual, and yearly basis. Now a list might do, but I often prefer to use charts when finishing my schedule as they look nicer and a bit cleaner and easier to understand. Go ahead then and create yourself a chart either on paper or in Microsoft word. Make sure that your chart labels all time periods (daily, weekly, monthly, semi-annual, and yearly) clearly and begin placing all cleaning tasks in their appropriate category. Feel free to add little check boxes at the end of each cleaning task that you can mark when you finish a job.
Cleaning schedules are greatly beneficial, and they really help us to quicken our cleaning. It’s also great to have so we're not trying to focus on so many different chores at once. The one common problem that I tend to see over and over is a lack of consistency when utilizing a schedule. This can either be the result of forgetting to use your schedule, not using it at all, or time restraints. When it comes to time restraints feel free to adjust your cleaning schedule so that it fits your own personal schedule. No need to stress over cleaning when it’s not an option; just make sure to do so when you have the time.
Once your schedule is completely finished we need to remember to use it. Consistency is the key when using a cleaning schedule. In order to make sure we achieve this we need to be reminded of it on a daily basis. Place the schedule in areas of the house where you know you will see it and be reminded of it. It’s only by using our schedule and staying with it that we will be able to reap the benefits that it can provide for us.
Debra Marks is a House Cleaning expert and author. For more great tips on how to construct a house cleaning schedule, you can visit www.simplehousecleaning.com a website dedicated to providing quality information on house cleaning.
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