CREATING A CLEANING ROUTINE THAT WORKS FOR YOU!

YOUR CLEANING ROUTINE NEEDS TO WORK FOR YOU

If you are like me, you might have tried many different ways to manage cleaning your home over the years.  This is because cleaning is one of the areas that I really struggle with. It’s not that I struggle with doing the actual work.  I let myself get overwhelmed with overthinking everything.  How often should the shower curtain be washed?  When is the last time I dusted the ceiling fan?

I am not someone that just keeps the house clean naturally.  I don’t just intuitively walk around and know what needs to be done and when to do it.  On occasion, I will walk by something, and say oh that really needs to be done.  I’ll then stress a little bit about when it should get done. Then if it wasn’t on one of my lists, I’ll probably forget about it. I am no expert on creating cleaning routines, but I have definitely found things that have really helped me out. Those things are the tips that I am going to share with you today.

We all have different schedules and different things on our calendars.  Some of us like to do stuff in the morning, some like to do stuff at night.  Some of us prefer to spend time cleaning on the weekends. While others prefer to do some each day during the week and keep the weekends free.

The most important part of creating a cleaning routine that works for you is to find one that will fit the best within your current life situation and make sense with when you like to get things done. So, I cannot tell you how and when it would be best to get your cleaning routines done. But, I will share some tips on what to think about as you create your routines.

TRY HAVING A SPECIFIC BLOCK OF TIME OR TRIGGER

 One thing that has really worked for me is having a definite time when I do cleaning routines. I am a morning person, so I do certain cleaning tasks for half an hour each weekday morning. I wake up, exercise for 1/2 hour, then clean for 1/2 hour, and then get ready for work. By having the 1/2 hour of cleaning squeezed in between exercising and getting ready for work, I don’t allow myself time to procrastinate. I know that is the time that I have to get the task for the day done.

Having a definite amount of time to get the cleaning done, helps push me to get it done. It’s like what they say about a task expanding to fill the amount of time allotted.  That definitely applies to me.  If I allow myself a generally longer period of time to get cleaning time, I definitely do not stay as focused and tend to spend way too much time getting stuff done.

If you are a night person, you could maybe have a time slot to clean before getting ready for bed. That way you are up against a certain time when you want to go to bed that would push you to get done. Or maybe try doing some cleaning before it’s time to start cooking dinner. It’s really just about trying to kind of block yourself into an allotted period of time so that you can create a cleaning routine that works for you.

If you are not the type to allow a task to expand, then this might not be needed for you.  Doing this has helped me, so I am thinking there are some of you that might benefit from this tip.

IDENTIFY WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT TO YOU TO HAVE CLEANED EACH WEEK

Knowing that some weeks you will have more time to clean than others, it’s important to identify what cleaning tasks are most important to you. These are kind of your non-negotiable cleaning chores. If you have things that are non-negotiable but are so much already part of your day that they are never really an issue, then you do not need to include those things.  For example, we do dishes automatically after dinner, and I just do laundry as a habit whenever it needs to get done.  So, I don’t really identify those as part of my non-negotiables when working on my cleaning routines.

If you are not sure about your cleaning priorities try comparing various tasks and think which you would rather have done, if you could only do one of them. For example, one of my top priorities is cleaning the bathrooms.  If I was short on time, I would rather have the bathroom cleaned than have the floors in our living areas mopped. Everyone has different priorities, so really think about what is most important to you if you were really limited on time.

Identifying my priorities and making sure those get done is really helpful to me.  If I have a really busy week and don’t get much else done, I remind myself that the most important things were done, and I’ll hopefully get some more things done next week. For example, each Saturday my routine is to clean the guinea pig cage, clean the fish tank, and water plants. If I get nothing else done on Saturday, I remind myself that all of the living things were taken care of!  And those were the most important things that had to get done!

WEEKLY TASKS

For your weekly tasks, once you have decided when you will clean and what your priorities are, it can be helpful to decide what order things will be done, and always do it that way. This helps you with solidifying your routine so that you don’t have to put a lot of thought into it. For example, I have my priority tasks assigned to a day of the week. In my Monday morning 1/2 hour cleaning slot, I clean our upstairs bathroom. By knowing that the bathroom gets cleaned on Monday morning, I get up grab the stuff that I need and get the bathroom cleaned. I don’t have to waste any time, looking at a list and deciding what I am going to do that morning.

If you prefer to do your cleaning on a particular day, and not over the course of the week, then decide what order your tasks will be done. Again, by doing this, once you have your routine down you can roll right through from one task to another without having to take time to look at a list and decide what to do next.

Try to schedule one cleaning time slot for weekly cleaning tasks that are above and beyond your highest priorities.  Some weeks you might not get to them, but other weeks you will.  This will allow flexibility to let things go without feeling guilty when you need that time for something else. When creating a cleaning routine that works for you, it is really important to give yourself some flexibility!

PERIODIC TASKS

Where I have always, and still do struggle the most is with periodic tasks.  Those things that need to get done once a month, once a quarter, etc. I often feel overwhelmed as if I am not keeping up on these things enough. I try to tell myself that it must be like this for others too!

For the monthly/occasional items I have used the fly lady app for years to keep track of those items.  I am not going to go into the fly lady method in detail in this post. But basically, one of the things she recommends is dividing your house into different zones and doing some deep cleaning in one of those zones per week.  I used to do weekly podcast episodes going over what I had on my list for each zone. If you are interested in going back and listening to any of those, they are all out there!  We also have printable zone cleaning lists in our private listener’s group on Facebook.

Even with the fly lady system, I struggled with keeping up on the zones.  Some weeks I wouldn’t get to my zone cleaning at all. And some weeks I would only get to a few things in the zone. So, if that zone didn’t come back for 4 weeks, it could be several months before I got everything done. For some things in the zone cleaning, that’s totally fine.  There are some detailed cleaning tasks in there that do not need to be done very frequently. However, I would focus on getting everything on the list in a zone done before starting the list over again.

So, say something like “dust ceiling fan” was on my zone cleaning list.  For me, that needs to be done more often, not weekly, but I don’t want to wait several months either. I struggled with prioritizing the tasks within the zone by how often they needed to be done. I didn’t want to wait until months went by and I checked off everything on the list for that zone, before getting the ceiling fan done.

Currently, I am trying to kind of create my own method using the fly lady zones as a basis. I still have things broken down by zone. I then identify them by what I would like done over a certain period of time. And which things can get done whenever I get to them. So, while this is still kind of in progress, my tip here is to prioritize those periodic tasks also so that you are not trying to get all of them done first, before getting back to the ones that need to be done more frequently.

START SMALL AND BUILD FROM THERE

If you don’t have a cleaning routine in place yet it will probably take you some time to find what works best for you. Just keep trying different things out and see what sticks! If you keep at it, your routine will eventually evolve into one that works for you! It might not be perfect, but you will be getting things done!

Thanks so much for checking in! If you would like to hear the podcast version of this topic to check out Lola’s Frugal Life Podcast! Also, be sure to check out my other blog posts on this site!