
We all love a nice clean home, but these days it can be difficult to balance everything in our lives AND clean the house. Finding the time to clean when you’ve got a full schedule can feel impossible, and it’s easy to let things overwhelm you until it feels like a giant mountain of chores. This, however, needn’t be your reality! Using the tips below, you can keep your home clean even though you’ve got a busy schedule that seemingly makes it impossible. Read on to find out how.
Prioritise
The first step in keeping your house clean even when you’re super busy is to figure out what needs to be done as opposed to what you would just like to get done and prioritize those needs. That way, if you run out of time, you know that you at least accomplished what needed to be cleaned. Of course, if you have more time than you thought, you can use it to tackle those other chores you’ve left pending for a while.
Prioritising is huge when it comes to accomplishing any task. That’s why professional cleaning companies use a cleaning checklist to prioritise all the main spots. For example, Maids 2 Match, a popular cleaning company in Dallas makes it a point to ask clients for a priority checklist before they get started. This is particularly helpful if you’re hiring a cleaner on an hourly basis.
The same idea of prioritisation also applies when you’re the one doing the cleaning as well.
Divide Tasks into Daily Habits and Weekly Chores
The next step is to identify some cleaning tasks which should become daily habits, such as making the bed, picking up clutter, washing the dishes (or at least putting them in the dishwasher), and to practice doing those things every day. Are you going to have a perfect streak of completing all of these tasks every single day? Probably not, but practicing doing these things daily will make it become second nature and will keep your home looking tidy.
Then, identify some chores which should be done weekly like cleaning the bathroom, vacuuming, mopping the floors, and washing your sheets and towels. The key here is NOT to do all of these things on one day. Assign each one of them to a day of the week, and on that day, complete it as quickly as you can. When you divide chores into daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, they are a lot easier to manage.
Put Things Away as Soon as You Use Them
When you’re busy, it’s easy to leave things lying around the house, but it creates more mess for you to clean later. If you put things away the moment you’re done with them, like your shoes and coat when you enter the house or the cereal box after breakfast, your space will stay less cluttered and you’ll have one less task to do later.
Clean More Frequently
This one sounds counterintuitive since you’re already busy, but the more frequently you clean, the easier it becomes to keep your place clean. You can accomplish a lot just by doing small frequent tasks to prevent the buildup of dirt and grime. One way to do this is to keep disinfectant wipes easily accessible and wipe surfaces daily or every other day – it sounds like a lot more work, but these tasks only take 30 seconds if you do them often. If you let the dirt build-up, you’ll be looking at a much harder and time-consuming job.
Micro Clean When You Can
Following on from cleaning more frequently, you’d be amazed at what you can accomplish when you find yourself with a small pocket of unexpected time. Have five minutes while you wait for your kids to get dressed? Sweep the kitchen. Another five minutes while dinner is in the oven? Unload the dishwasher. One of our favorites: fold laundry while watching Netflix. You’ll have a clean space in no time!
Take Off Your Shoes
Shoes are dirty. In fact, they’re one of the most common ways for dirt to spread across your home. If you make it a habit to take off your shoes at the door, you’ll be limiting the amount of dirt in your home, making it that much easier to clean.
Keep Cleaning Supplies Handy
If you keep some basic cleaning supplies in each of the rooms that need the most cleaning (i.e. the kitchen and bathrooms), then you can quickly wipe something down whenever you have a moment. On the other hand, if you’re required to walk to another room of the house to get those supplies, you’re probably not going to do it.
Clean One Room at a Time, and Stay There
It’s easy to get thrown off track while you’re cleaning – all it takes is one stray item and before you know it, you’ve left the room to put it away and gotten sidetracked because you saw something else that needed to be done. To help keep you on task, stay in one room at a time and don’t leave it to put stuff away. If you find items that are out of place, put them just outside the door and take care of them once you’ve finished cleaning the room. You’ll be amazed at how much time you’ll save by not getting distracted with those things.
Invest in Good Cleaning Equipment
If you feel like you’re doing extra work because you have to pass over the same spot multiple times when cleaning, then it’s time for an upgrade! Investing in newer equipment that is more efficient will allow you to get things done more quickly. This could mean anything from replacing a raggedy mop to buying a more powerful vacuum cleaner.
Be Happy With “Clean Enough”
We get it. It’s easy to want your home to be 100% clean all of the time but this perfectionism simply isn’t realistic, nor is it necessary. You’ll never be able to keep every single speck of dirt off the floor or keep your mantle perfectly dusted all of the time, especially not if you’re already running low on time.
Now, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t strive for a clean home (otherwise this article wouldn’t exist). Figure out how much cleaning needs to be done to keep your home healthy, and you happy, but in the process, just keep in mind what’s clean enough and what’s unrealistic.
So there you have our best tips for keeping your home clean with a busy schedule. Following these tips should help you establish some good habits and get your home looking tidy and clean on a regular basis without taking too much of your precious free time.
Related Posts
- Teenage Bedroom Cleaning Checklist - 02/01/2024
- Is Hard Water Affecting Your Home & Health? - 09/10/2021
- How to Clean 6 Essential Baking Tools - 09/01/2021