Week Two: Tidy Trials

Week Two dawns with you having a full file folder or a notebook of completed room evaluations, right? Perhaps. But if you didn’t quite finish all the rooms, of course, you want to do that. If you only have one room to attend to, week two may very well be day two. The point is to have worked through on paper what each room needs, or could have done to it. Here’s what you will have if you actually do all the work:

• General information about the room is permanently recorded for future reference for those big improvement projects (new window treatments, painting, etc.). Accrued benefit.
• The detailed list, broken down by how often the job should be done, for everything you can think of to keep the room spit spot. Pre-planning. Back Planning. Profitable inefficiencies. 
• Several quick fix ideas that will improve something about the room or its function, as well as long-term ideas to improve the room. Evaluations. Attend.
• A quick routine plan to pull the room into order in a limited amount of time. Attend and Automate. Dovetailing.

That’s where we start in week two, so if that didn’t get done last week, do it before “week two” starts!

To review the quick routine plan: As you stand in the doorway of the room under evaluation, you made (or need to make) some decisions about the minimum level of tidiness you can tolerate in the room IF unexpected guests walked in. That’s your benchmark.

To achieve that minimum, you then designed a quick way to get to that point. At this early point, it might well mean a one time fix to solve an ongoing eye sore: throwing out a broken chair, removing large stacks of magazines, buying a bookcase for all the books on the floor, etc. But over the long haul (as those one-timers disappear), the routine will become a quick series of tidying tasks: straightening pillows, removing clutter, clearing the counter, wiping sinks and sweeping the floor, etc. that will need attention for as long as you have the room, so designing a good routine is going to be a help for a long time.

Week Two has us running the first tests of those preliminary routines, room by room. So get the stopwatch on your phone ready for action–or a “real” stopwatch if you have one.

Start by preparing a computer document or pencil/paper list of your planned routine for each room. Allow yourself only FIVE minutes per room. FIFTEEN minutes for the kitchen. Do not take any more direct cleaning time than that in each room. Time yourself and see how much of your list you can get done in the five/fifteen minutes. After doing a room, take another ten to fifteen minutes to evaluate:

• Could the room be completely tidied in the five minutes?
• Did the amount of clutter keep you from finishing your routine?
• Does your routine list include too many tasks that take too long?
• Were you able to dust or vacuum in that amount of time?
• Did you have all the tools and supplies for cleaning right with you and ready to go?
• Were you distracted by: the phone, a child, starting to “deep clean” a desk top, disorderly shelf, something else?
• Do you feel that if you practiced the routine, and consistently performed the routine day in and day out, it could be accomplished in the five (or fifteen for kitchen) minute time limit? If not, five minutes (or fifteen for kitchen), could you get in done in eight minutes (twenty for kitchen)? Ten minutes (twenty-five for kitchen)?
• What changes might you make to tweak your routine?
• Do you have some ideas for how to order the tasks you did the room to perhaps get more done in the same amount of time?

Of course, being the professional executive you are, you’ll record these notes with your routine list.

The overall goal for the week is to time the quick clean time in each room three (or more times), but to spend no more than thirty minutes total cleaning each day, other than the kitchen. If you are puttering around your house all day, you might wonder what to do with all the extra time, but for most of us, actually cleaning consistently thirty minutes a day might be a challenge. Remember to time and evaluate each session.

You may want to decide during EO time the order you’ll tackle the rooms and when you’ll fit their little trial runs in during the week. One option is to start on the weekend and attend to the main rooms twice over the weekend: kitchen, bedroom, living space, and bath. Most other rooms in bigger homes are duplicates of those spaces: more bedrooms, baths, and living spaces. Then work to attend to those rooms, and any others several times during the week. This may be one of the few times that your executive oversight meeting might find you “cleaning and clocking” if you have a very tight schedule of commitments beyond spending the week cleaning!

The kitchen will surely get an almost daily turn, but see if you can buy up some odd five minutes here and there to whirl through the other rooms. If it is really impossible, then just stretch the project into the next week. Remember, you are trying to organize those tasks you determined were ROUTINE cleaning (the daily, weekly, and an occasional bi-weekly tasks from your task chart). Don’t worry about the other cleaning tasks this week.