Time Management Tips for Cleaning and Maintaining Your Home

Guest Blogger #567, Entry #1282, June 14, 2012

Nobody really relishes the tasks associated with keeping a household clean and making sure that everything functions properly, but we all like coming home to a space that is sparklingly free of clutter and debris, and being able to turn on lights and faucets without the worry that they won’t work. So it is in your best interest to engage in regular maintenance and frequent cleaning. But if you are busy with the demands of a job and family, as most adults are, you might have trouble fitting these tasks into your daily life. So here are just a few tips and tricks to help you manage your time when it comes to cleaning and maintaining your home.

white bedroom

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Set a schedule.

You probably have a schedule to help you manage meetings and deadlines for work as well as keep track of all the kids’ events and activities. But this could account for the majority of your time on a day-to-day basis. Although you might like to think that any space that isn’t already full should become leisure time, the truth is that you already fill the white space with everything from errands to activities like cooking, bathing, and sleeping. So squeezing in chores may seem impossible. But if you pencil in the time for them regularly you’ll find that you get them done and they go a lot faster. Consider putting in one or two cleaning job each week (such as bathrooms, dusting, or vacuuming) and then schedule in maintenance tasks (like cleaning the gutters or replacing batteries in smoke alarms) throughout the calendar year.

Economize.

When you’ve got buckets full of cleaning solvents it’s no wonder your chores take you longer. By switching to an all-in-one product that works equally well on counters, sinks, toilets, mirrors, and more you can save yourself some time during the actual cleaning process.

Delegate.

Who says that one person should be solely responsible for cleaning and maintaining the home? Unless you live alone there are other people creating messes. So think about setting a revolving list of chores so that each inhabitant can do their share of cleaning (since they certainly make their share of messes). If you have standards for how things should be cleaned, be sure to train your spouse, kids, or roommates rather than just getting irked when they do it “wrong”.

Make yourself a cleaning plan that works

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Prioritize.

You can’t clean the whole house every day, no matter how much you’d like to keep your space spotless. This means you’re going to have to set priorities for cleaning. Some rooms will need more frequent cleaning due to the fact that they tend to get messy faster (kitchen, bathrooms, etc.) so these may take priority. And since the kitchen is used for food preparation it is imperative that it remains clean and sanitized, making it more important than, say, a cluttered bedroom.

Clean as you go.

Rather than letting things get to the point where you have to devote an hour-long window in your schedule to cleaning (and time it via http://stopwatch.onlineclock.net), you might want to clean as you go. This means wiping up spills as they happen rather than leaving them to get crusty and hard on countertops. This mentality will save you tons of time when you get down to the task of deep-cleaning.

For more home organization ideas on Stagetecture, click here.