Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Housekeeping

Occasionally (fine... daily) I time myself while performing random household tasks. I find it helps me to keep my perspective on the days I feel tempted to make statements like "I spend my whole life cleaning" or "I never have any free time."

My mom once gave me a great housekeeping tip, which was that if I could employ a general system of order and commit to cleaning once a week, then caring for my house would not be an overwhelming task. In other words, if your house is basically clean and organized, then a little bit of tidying every day keeps things from getting out of control.

I spend 5 minutes/day in each room of my house, and 15 minutes in the kitchen. It comes out to about 30 minutes a day. Doable. And then I stop.

So far, this system has been great, and I've become even more of a believer since Kisa has begun walking and flinging random items around the house. She has the ability to make my living room look like a war zone, but because of my timer, I now know that no matter how terrible the chaos seems, it only takes me an average of 2.5 minutes to correct.

I also know that it takes me only 4 minutes to unload and re-load my dishwasher, which is less than the amount of time it takes to make a cup of tea. Not bad.

So if I happen to walk into my house at 12:45pm (like I did today) and find every room cluttered with dirty dishes, toys and laundry in a questionable state of cleanliness, at the very least I can know that within 30 minutes I can be back to my tidy happy place. And I will still have at least an hour and a half of naptime left to relax. Or to blog.

2 comments:

Sarah said...

I also have a friend who has her days generally outlined... i.e. Tuesdays are for grocery shopping, Wednesdays are for Dr. appointments, etc, etc. I hope to employ this organization strategy when I'm home more later on in life.

Angie said...

Mondays are laundry day. Other then that, I'm lost.