Frequently Asked Questions About Room Evaluations

Usually there are lots of questions about how to  break down the cleaning tasks and how to determine the cycle for how often a task will receive attention. Here are the FAQs for handling that portion of the form:

How will I determine how often a task should be done?  A great question.  The goal is to schedule a task as often as needed to keep things hygienic, tidy, serviceable. Make a determination based on that criteria, not how little you want to do the job! Admittedly, some choices will be arbitrary and you may need to experiment. Something you think is “always” a mess, may be fine if  you attend to it consistently once a week. Shows you how time flys…

If you need to err, err on the side of  scheduling the task more often than may be needed. Once you begin to handle it on its cycle, consistently (are you sensing a trend here?),  you can easily skip a scheduled time if the area is up to standard. It’s harder to give a task an additional slot once you’ve compiled the big schedule.

How general shall I be with the tasks I list? Not general at all. Be specific. Do not record “dust room.” Break down the dusting: dust lamp shades, dust molding, dust horizontal surfaces, etc. My personal goal was to have each task I listed take no more than 10-15 minutes. This means I listed individual shelves and drawers, not entire book cases and dressers. Tedious thinking, I know, but there are benefits.

• A drawer that holds two extra blankets may only get cleaned once  a year (Dr#5 1x/yr) but a drawer used for undergarments may get straightened once a month (Dr #1 12/yr) and thoroughly cleaned once or twice a year (Dr #1 12x/yr; 2x/yrDC).
• Breaking down tasks allows you to attend to regularly touched areas (door handles, light switches, phones, curtain and blind pulls) or horizontal surfaces more often than untouched or vertical areas.

How can I fit all the information in that small space? And yes, even on a perpetual calendar, and certainly on the evaluation chart, the space to write in the tasks is small. Develop codes for yourself DC = Deep Clean. BC = Book Case. CL Bd1 Fl = Closet in Bedroom 1, the floor. DR Ch1 = dining room chair #1. dB, sh#1 = down bath, shelf #1. uB, dr#3 = upstairs bath, drawer #3. They will only be unfamiliar for a time or two, but as you refer to them routinely, they’ll be clear and concise reminders of what should get attention.

What if I don’t guess right this first time? Don’t worry. This is a trial run. The first routine is all tasks you will do often, so you’ll get many opportunities to fine tune  how long certain jobs may take, and how often they need done, once the area is receiving consistent, intentional, and focused attention. Your chart is in pencil and can be adjusted.

What if I have four or five quick fix projects? Once you have evaluated all your rooms, you can put the fixes on a cycle, one a pay period, or one a month. If they are all labor projects, so much the better. The game here is to not get into a habit of buying items to make you feel better about your room(s), but to see how little you can spend to rectify a big frustration.

What if there is no way I can evaluate all my living spaces in a week? Don’t panic. Plan your own reasonable routine to cover everything, write it down in your notebook, schedule it on your calendar, and check to see if you’ve kept to your own schedule during your weekly meeting.  You are the steward of your space. Your responsibility is to be consistently and thoroughly attending to the details you have in your space in order to have a tidy area for guests and good routines to train others.

Isn’t this major overkill for something as basic as straightening a room? Of course, if the goal is simply to fluff pillows and straighten items on a coffee table, yes. But the goal is not just straightening you primary living space, it is knowing everything that needs stewardship attention on a variety of level, and having a design that assures you alone could attend to all those tasks in an exemplary fashion, regardless of other demands on your schedule. Such a plan also:

• Provides guidance for making future changes and improvements to your living spaces.
• Provides objective clarity about what “thorough” means for each of your living spaces.
• Helps you think about having your home comfortable for others, not just what you are willing to put up with.
• Provides objective tools to help train apprentices: specific lists of jobs that actually need done (not just busy work), objective ways to evaluate performances, a way to time them and schedule them, lots of practice with basic skills they will use their whole life, short time modules to keep their focus and attention to the finish, and meaningful, actual work that benefits the entire family and it gives you discrete tasks you can select to train, the discrete tasks are short enough to reasonably expect their full focus until finished, and discrete enough, they can take over real tasks at young ages.
• Gives you a way to train and monitor yourself. You can become accountable to yourself, even if no one else is available for the job.
• Gives you a variety of ways to control the time you spend cleaning on either a daily or weekly basis