Week Three, Part Two: Timed Coordination

Time for more timing! After you have designed a scheme for weekly routine cleaning, you need to test the plan.

Instead of the quick tidy-up five minute flash, scurrying from room to room, you’ll now invest fifteen to twenty minutes a day doing cleaning that you know will attend to all the routine tasks over the course of a week. How will you know how much time you need each day? Or if you have broken the tasks down enough to fit in the time frame? Here’s the plan: Start with ten minutes for each day’s assigned tasks, work really hard to accomplish those tasks inside that deadline, and only inch it up minute by minute when you are absolutely sure you can’t ever do your complete routine run-through without more time.

If you find yourself going past the twenty minute mark, do some more re-arranging or breaking down of tasks. Can a specific job be broken down even more? Can it be done less often (twice or three times a week)? Can you streamline the other tasks on those days? Can you change something that will make it easier (a less elaborate bed making ritual, perhaps?)

No doubt you can see the advantage to each person in a household ultimately shouldering responsibility for their own living space: less for you to fit in to your routine plan. Having a successful ten to fifteen minute bedroom/clothing routine makes a big difference in a home. Personally, I always tried to limit the routine bedroom work to right around ten minutes, allow another ten-fifteen minutes for that day’s part of the weekly routine cleaning, and another ten-fifteen minutes for a “deep cleaning” task (which haven’t been scheduled yet). If I incorporated the routine kitchen cleaning tasks with food preparation times, and the kitchen’s deep cleaning tasks into the final deep cleaning schedule, then daily cleaning could be kept to 30-40 minutes total, and could be done at different times, combined or separated, could be “neglected” one day and given a bit extra attention the next.

It is almost always true, that once you attend to each room efficiently, or once your overall routine cleaning is effectively coordinated, a less frequently scheduled task, or a deep cleaning task, can be incorporated into the routine cleaning time slot, without adding extra time. More accrued benefits.

Obviously, the kitchen and bath areas will need continuous attention. If you find it hard to do a careful job in the kitchen within your time limit, try removing more appliances or other items from the counters. Select a particular task to concentrate on after each meal. Or see what you can do with one extra fifteen minute cleaning slot scheduled back to back with your regular routine cleaning time one night a week or during the weekend. Another option to try is to take an hour once a week and test whether you can do good surface cleaning, floors, cabinetry around handles, scouring the sinks, straightening most used cupboards, and clearing the refrigerator in that amount of time.

Consider combining  joined living spaces into one cleaning unit. If the dining area floor needs attention every day and the living room only once a week, you could just take care of the living room one day while doing the dining room.

As you work on a regular basis, try to work with more foresight and focus, always thinking about ways to eliminate problems that slow down your routine work or make the deep cleaning harder. Almost everyone finds that the consistent attention allows the work to go faster, since nothing has been ground in, left to mold, or gets buried under a foot of clutter.

When will week three be done? After you have designed a weekly routine cleaning plan that covers what each room requires and will not take more than fifteen to twenty minutes of focused work to accomplish.

When that happens, you’ll have two tools ready to use: a quick-tidy routine and a weekly routine cleaning plan. The quick-tidy is designed to whip any given room into order in only five to ten minutes. The weekly routine coordinates tasks for all rooms over a week’s span, and allows for about fifteen to twenty minutes of daily attention dedicated to cleaning.

This gives you flexibility and options for scheduling: You could do all the routine tasks for the week in one weekly session, or two or three sessions, or a bit each day. You can quick tidy the living room at night and do the one or two weekly routine tasks the next morning. Only two more areas need attention: the deep cleaning plan (whose tasks will be spread over the full year) and some thought to training apprentices.