Photo from unsplashOriginally Posted On: 9 Ways to Keep Up with the Chores at Home | Our Good Life (terristeffes.com)
Chores are a necessary evil and not always everyone’s favorite way to spend their time, especially if you have a large family, health conditions, or just very little free time. Annoyingly, the longer you leave it, the worse it gets. Everyone knows this; however, finding the motivation to get stuck in regularly can be somewhat lacking at times.
Keeping your home in tip-top condition and clean and organized can take some planning on your part to ensure you come up with a schedule suitable to ensure you spend as little time cleaning as possible.
Create A Schedule
Make a list of everything that needs doing and section it into things you need to do daily, every other day, weekly, and so on. Prioritizing tasks can allow you to tackle them first and set aside other times for less labor-intensive jobs. It’s convenient if you have children and want them to help you with cleaning and chores.
Next, you need to allocate a day and time slot per person for each task. If you share this between a few people, ensure you have sorted everything fairly, so no one gets to carry the bulk of the chores. Try to keep each week the same as much as possible.
Invest in Cleaning Gadgets
Some cleaning appliances and gadgets are worth their weight in gold, and others are a waste of money. Buying the best products you can afford will ensure you get a better result, and you can rely on them for longer than buying a cheaper version. Think of choosing the best stick vacuum cleaners, hard floor cleaners, window cleaners, washing machines, etc.
While you don’t need all the gadgets in the market, think carefully about what would make your life easier and invest in a select few products that can be used for different purposes to ensure you are spending less time cleaning.
Set Time Limits
Set yourself time blocks of, say, 15 mins two or three times per day. Everyone can find 15 minutes in a day, can’t they? If you stop to think about everything that needs doing, chances are it will be overwhelming. So breaking down the task into 15-minute blocks can help you engage in short, sharp bursts of cleaning and organization without it being too much. If two or more people are doing this once or twice a day, as per a schedule, if you have one, then before you know it, you will be on top of everything without feeling like you are spending all of your time cleaning.
Done Not Perfect
Do you really need to get that showhome to look all day, every day? Aim for things to be done, not perfect, and while this might feel like you are lowering your standards, as long as your house is clean and tidy, chances are, you aren’t! Putting extra pressure on yourself to maintain appearances can be exhausting, especially if you manage a job and family and live your life.
Break It Down
Tackling the whole house as a whole is a big task. Instead, take each room as it is and look at what needs doing room by room or task by task. So focus on the kitchen and make sure this is as clean and organized as you need it to be. Then move onto a different room. Or maybe focus on rounding up all the washing. Sort your dirty washing to be cleaned into one room from around the house. When you have the washing machine running, look at putting away clean clothes so you know all the laundry is taken care of.
Or maybe you want to focus on clearing away all the toys back to where they should be from around the house. Whatever works for your house, break it down into smaller tasks, and even if that is all you complete that day, it is one less thing to do the next day.
Have Designated Spaces
Does everything in your home have a designated space where it lives when not in use? If not, you need to find somewhere for your stuff to go to remove it from just hanging around where it oughtn’t to be. It might be an idea to round up things that need to have a space assigned to them and place them in one area, such as on your dining room table. Then you can clear everything else away that needs to be done before finding a suitable place for your ‘lost items’ to go.
Declutter
If your home is always feeling cluttered or messy due to an abundance of stuff piled up in places, you need to have a good declutter and remove anything you no longer want or need. The trick to effective decluttering is to make sure that when you have identified items you no longer want, you remove them from your home to be disposed of or donated as soon as possible. Otherwise, it is still lying around your home, getting in the way.
Clean as You Go
not for everyone, but trying to get into the habit of cleaning as you go instead of leaving it for later n in the day can help you to avoid the dread of going home from work to dirty breakfast dishes or cleaning up the bathroom after a shower. Choose one area to focus on to clean as you go to reduce the time spent on that task each day or week.
Clean Top to Bottom
As a professional cleaner would do, clean from top to bottom, pile everything into a basket, clean the floors and furniture, move left to right, and put things away as you go. This will make the job easier as you will avoid returning to tasks, and the whole room will be completed at once. Remember to dust first and vacuum last to avoid having to repeat tasks as you go.
Try out different methods to help you to find what works for you for your home to allow you to keep on top of your chores in an easier, less time-consuming manner.
