Week Three, Part 1: Coordinating Routine Schedules

A big thinking week!

Last week you tested a quick tidy up routine, a routine designed to pull any room into order in a very short amount of time.

No doubt (unless your home is utterly amazing) you found yourself whizzing past many undone tasks from the room cleaning charts while you whipped around doing only the quick tidy-up tasks.

You probably learned a few other things, such as:

• vacuuming every space everyday used all the allotted five minutes and left no time for anything else.
• whipping through each day did make a overall improvement.
• running the same routine several times did train you to go faster and/or get more done.
• setting a five minute deadline allowed you to do more than you thought possible–but not everything that needed doing.

Week Three is the week to solve some of that problem by designing and testing a plan for routine cleaning: not a quick, “emergency” routine, but a standard operating procedure. 

To do this, you need to coordinate all the daily, biweekly, and weekly tasks from your cleaning charts into a  routine cleaning plan that attends to everything within a week’s time. Don’t faint. It’s a puzzle. It’s fun. Besides, you aren’t even thinking about the deep cleaning tasks right now. Just daily, biweekly, and weekly. Simple.

What you learned from your quick tidy trials last week should help:

• The discovery that you really can dust all the visible surfaces in five minutes.
• Documented evidence that your fluffy spread and twenty-seven designer pillows take a rushed twelve minutes to finish arranging.
• The realization that wiping up floor spills daily takes thirty seconds and makes the kitchen floor look better all week long.
• The greater realization that rooms receiving even a small amount of consistent attention can hold their own.
• The further realization that some of your estimates of how long a task would take or how often it needed done need tweaked.

Use all those new insights to design a weekly plan to account for all the daily, biweekly, and weekly tasks for your household. Designing a usable plan will be easier if you:

• Think through your personal and family schedules as you plan when to clean what and for how long. Maybe one of these scheduling ideas will help you get started: 1) Design ten minute modules for each room until you account for all the tasks. Then arrange the modules into scheduled work times throughout the week.  2) Plan one or two longer cleaning sessions to cover the tasks. 3) Design short routines for the daily tasks and combine all the weekly tasks into a once a week cleaning session. Add biweekly tasks to one daily time and to the weekly time, or two daily times.

• Accept the fact that good stewardship means giving tasks the time they require.  We all have a bottom-line responsibility to put in the time required to maintain what God has given. This part of the equation is not a cleaning issue, but a character issue. Some of us can afford to cut back on time spend puttering around cleaning. Some of us need to put in more time because the time we currently give to cleaning is not adequate to maintain a good stewardship minimum. All of us can practice working smarter during whatever time we invest.

• Get help if all this design and planning talk worries you, rather than excites you with the opportunity to piece together a life puzzle. Just ask someone to look over what you’ve designed at the end of the week. It might help keep you to the task. Or write me: at least I’ll know what you are trying to do.

• Keep the main goal in sight as you arrange the details. The design’s goal is to give you a way to maintain  a level of cleanliness and orderliness with  reasonable  amount of consistent, conscientious effort. Stick to routine, not deep cleaning tasks at this time.

• Keep in mind the secondary goal: to have a system to use to train apprentices at the right time.

• Be creative if your time is very limited. Don’t underestimate the value of consistent attention. A time consuming task sometimes melts into something quite manageable once it get even a couple of minutes of consistent daily attention.

• Piece together your cleaning routine  puzzle over the weekend, so you can begin time testing your routine on Monday, and follow it through the week.  Are your eyes rolling yet?