Simplifying the Housecleaning Habit
Wednesdays are simplicity days at SimpleProductivity blog.
I’ve been struggling with something recently. As much as I love having a neat and clean house, I cannot get myself motivated to actually do it.
When I ran into this problem years ago, Flylady helped me by showing me how to apply method to cleaning. Her overly rigid schedule didn’t work for me, though, and it fell by the wayside. I was OK for a few years working my own system…
…but I got out of the habit.
The Problem
Now the problem is that in establishing the habit, I am meeting resistance within myself. As a result, nothing much gets done. I tell myself I’m too tired to do things on weeknights, and I don’t want to give up my weekend to clean. It’s a vicious cycle that results in nothing getting done, and then the ignored jobs just get larger.
Cleaning the dust off the baseboards isn’t a big deal if it’s one or two months’ worth. It is a big deal when it’s been a year.
So how do I get out of this rut and back into the habit?
Analyzing The Resistance
The first thing I noticed was resistance in how I was approaching the tasks. I have lists of tasks that go for each room. Unfortunately, these lists are generic and don’t indicate how often something needs to be done. Unlike Flylady, I believe that there are tasks that should not be done every month. For example, cleaning formal curtains, washing the windows, cleaning the carpet, polishing the furniture. Doing these tasks too often actually leads to more work in the long run. But the lists aren’t distinguished, and so every month I am confronted with a list of tasks that shouldn’t be done, mixed in with the list of tasks that should.
The second part of the resistance is that I don’t like to leave things undone in the middle. Fifteen minutes are more than enough time to do many of the tasks on my list, particularly if they are kept up with. But what about the tasks that require more? Washing windows, for instance, requires at least 15 minutes per window, and the weather has to be right.
The third part of the resistance is that I don’t want to be doing heavy cleaning every day when there are surface issues to be taken care of. For instance, right now my formal dining room is home to my daughter’s Girl Scout cookie boxes, the laundry basket we use to hold giveaway items, my daughter’s old babydoll playset that is waiting to be freecycled, and for some reason, three first aid kits. What needs to happen in here, before any deep cleaning, is putting away all the stuff, and getting rid of things. After all, I can’t polish the table when it is piled high with stuff!
Getting Specific
So in my case, I have to tackle each of these areas of resistance.
I have to set aside one day to do a surface clean, to put away anything that doesn’t belong in that room.
I have to set aside a day to do a purge, because unused things seem to proliferate in our house.
I have to break my tasks down to indicate how often they should be done, and figure out what months they should be done (for example, cleaning the windows inside and out should not be done in the winter or summer).
And I must have a day where I can do longer-duration tasks.
Give Yourself A Break
The other thing I realized is that I need to not be doing cleaning every day. I need a break (or several) every week so I can rearrange my tasks based on my schedule. It may very well be that the schedule is so full that even taking 15 minutes means forgoing something else, like sleep.
Conclusion
I don’t know if this take at getting back into the housecleaning habit is going to help or not.
I would love to hear from any of you who have found solutions (and sorry, those who toe Flylady’s line of “if it doesn’t work you’re not doing it right” need not reply)
Photo by wotthe7734. Licensed under Creative Commons.
