Make Household Cleaning Easier: Make a Schedule

By Mishaun Taylor

With your busy life, making time to clean the house is probably one of the last things on your mind except when you’re having company. But by setting a schedule for yourself and your home, housecleaning won’t be so daunting and you’ll be able to maintain your home without feeling overwhelmed.

Creating a schedule can help organize your thoughts as to what needs to be done first, who is responsible for what, how much time you’ll need to put aside to accomplish the task, when the task must be completed by and, as a result, how much free time you can look forward to. Schedules work well in families so no one misunderstands what is expected of them, especially when they are posted in an area where all can read and check daily.

Here are some helpful hints for keeping your house clean while not losing your mind, your temper or a lot of your free time:

1. Post a schedule readily visible for the entire family. A dry-erase board or chalk board is useful so you can change it as needed and check off items as they are completed. Determine who has responsibility for what rooms. For example, children should have responsibility for their own rooms as best they can according to their ages.

2. Determine what is priority for cleaning and what can be postponed. Don’t swamp the chart and overburden yourselves with too many projects to be undertaken when you first start to follow the schedule. You likely can’t get everything done in a day, so break out your projects in what you can do on a daily, weekly, monthly, seasonally and yearly basis.

3. Make different schedules based on what is to be a daily responsibility (like doing the dishes and cleaning the litter box), weekly (like vacuuming, taking out the garbage, scrubbing tubs and sinks, doing the laundry or mopping the floors), monthly (like dusting or washing the windows) and seasonally (the spring cleaning mattress turn or cleaning out the garage). 
   
4. Your initial schedule may be very different from follow up schedules as you do the first overhaul of the house. Then your schedules will largely be made up of maintenance schedules, which will decrease your cleaning time even more.

5. If you find the maintenance of the house to be too daunting, even with a schedule, you can incorporate the service of a cleaning company into the schedule. The cleaning service can be responsible for particular tasks like vacuuming, scrubbing floors or washing windows. You can determine if you want a cleaning service to assist with tasks on a weekly, biweekly or monthly basis.

By making a schedule, you and your family will have a much better understanding about what housework is needed and what responsibilities each member of the family has in maintaining the schedule.